Re: Websites that require a username

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From: David King
Subject: Re: Websites that require a username
Date: 17:16 on 05 Oct 2006
> 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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