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> We already have something that can uniquely identify someone, and > these > sites already require users to give it to them. What's that, you > ask? Why > it's an email address. Sure, an email address has one person, but a person can have many email addresses, and a person occasionally gains and loses email addresses. I once tried to order something from a site that used email addresses for its unique identifier. When I told it my credit card number it said that there was already an account on file with that credit cart number. I guess I'd ordered from them before, and they didn't want more than one account to use a given credit card (the sanity of this point is as questionable as their retaining my credit card number when I *never* tick any box asking to keep my payment information in file, and explicitly *untick* any similar boxes). I tried a different credit card and it made the same complaint of my shipping address, saying that that name and address already had an account as well. The problem was, I couldn't remember which email address I was using when I ordered from them the first time. If I had ordered from them, it must have been at least two employers ago, and since I usually use myaddress+merchantname@xxx.xxx, but sometimes I don't (depending on how spammy I believe that merchant may be), this means that I had a large number of permutations of address, domain, various ways of specifying the merchant name, and possible passwords to go through. Since none of my current email addresses worked in the "I forgot my password, please email it to me" form, I eventually decided that they didn't want my money in exchange for goods and/or services, and left.
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