Your Email Is (Practically) Your Identity

Identity is the aspect of one's personality (or something like this). Email is a contact method, which can be identity's representation - it can be associated with an identity, but it is certainly not the identity itself.

First of all, every human has an identity — it is automatically created, it's just that there are no ways to address it by itself. On contrary, an email is obtained and, moreover, provided by someone else. This is a fundamental difference which explains why an email just can't be an identity by itself.

It's only a person who should possess his own identity — and you can't possess an email address, you always lease it from someone else (even in self-hosted scenario the domain part comes from ICANN).

Please, don't ever mistake identities with methods to contact. Identity does not even imply that such may exist. If you want to contact someone — ask for contact data, not identity, like you ask for a phone number and not a name. I'd also note that this does not mean that identity and contact means must not be associated together — it's just that they must be loosely coupled. The article's argument is wrong — if I'd lose my phone number and get another one I won't lose my identity to my friends — they just won't be able to contact me for some time.

I just hope someday someone (with the help of software vendors, most important - browser ones) would get the identity right. And use cryptography, so, I could actually possess my own identities (i.e. my own keypairs). Sure, there are more enough problems with this approach, too, but at least the concept is not broken at the very core.