eBay announced its decision to abandon the use of Microsoft Passport and .NET services later this month to allow hassle-free and other variants of secure login authentication systems for its users.

In October of 2004, world’s top most Monster.com also discontinued the use of Microsoft’s aforementioned secure transaction software to return to other alternatives.

The world’s largest software maker quickly became the center of attention after the launch of its secure applications, which was used by numerous high profiled sites for secure login. The reason for such a launch was to attract more customers to Microsoft products and strategically become a key partner in millions of transactions by storing user information from one site to another.

Since the launch, Microsoft has been involved in controversial debates over the web-applications’ security. In 2002, it was forced to settle charges of privacy and security of its users by the Federal Trade Commission (United States). Later in 2003, security experts found a flaw in the service, which could’ve compromised highly sensitive user information, such as credit card numbers and addresses, if tampered with by an intruder.

Market research firm, Gartner, advised businesses against the use of Microsoft’s services for secure transactions at the time. The software giant rebutted by informing the security threat to be fairly mild and released a patch to fix the flaw.

The software company also took a serious hit when Liberty Alliance, formed by rivals Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Sony issued guidelines for secure e-commerce sites.

One of the critical reasons for e-commerce sites to move away from Microsoft’s services is the fact that the software maker may make the services a paid addition to its product line, which has been a discouraging factor for my sites.

Now it seems that Microsoft is working with rival companies to work on services that will allow independent companies to work on their own web applications.

Microsoft did state that users will continue to log into its services, such as Hotmail, via aforementioned applications.

eBay said users will have to directly log into eBay’s servers and it will discontinue the use of .NET alerts. eBay’s initiative goes live later this month.