Adrian Colomitchi <acolomitchi@gmail.com> writes:
Now, my question: what an email address has to do with the identity of the owner?
An email address is always globally unique. A common name (e.g. “Ben Finney”) is often not globally unique. Therefore, to identify an individual person, an email address is better than only a name. Better still is their name and an email address for them.
By the same measure, what the "full person name" or any other "govt/authority emitted ID" have to do with the identity of the owner?
Identity is a problem without a simple solution. A big part of human brains is, quite literally, designed to deal with the problem. Gathering easily-verifiable low-collision evidence of a person's unique identity – e.g. email address, government-issued identifiers, photos, etc. – makes the problem easier to deal with. But if you're implying there is no perfect solution to the problem of identifying people? Of course, there isn't. Yet we still need to deal with the problem.
E.g. assume that
Let's keep it to real examples. Hypothetical examples that are difficult to deal with are endless, but they don't defeat the purpose of identifying people to the best of our ability. In other words: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. -- \ “You can't have everything; where would you put it?” —Steven | `\ Wright | _o__) | Ben Finney