Facebook challenges email for control of your online identity

techcrunch.com

20 points·tetrep··4 comments

This is scary. Email as an identity management platform is okay because the protocol itself is distributed. No one company holds the keys to "email." Sure, people have moved towards centralized email providers like Gmail, but many other individuals and companies still run their own email servers.

The scary part comes in when you think that if this technology becomes popular, new services might provide account recovery or identity management features solely through Facebook. As we've seen countless times in the past, centralization like this only makes it a better target for abuse by malicious actors (Facebook included!).

Actually, it's not okay.

Email is provided, by a third party (email service or, at the very least, domain name registry). Identity is inherent property of its owner.

Passwords suck, but happily disowning identities, letting third parties lease them - that's scary.

I guess by "okay" I meant "not terrible," but you're certainly right; email as identity is not much to be excited about.

That's why you buy a domain.

Although you can argue this is still a service, it's way better then Facebook.

Also multiple personas online is a feature. Unless in rare cases, this doesn't replicate in real life.

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