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Message from discussion Possible consideration of hiding email addresses from sites?
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Ben Adida  
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 More options Jul 18 2011, 10:09 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.identity
From: Ben Adida <b...@adida.net>
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:09:03 -0700
Local: Mon, Jul 18 2011 10:09 pm
Subject: Re: Possible consideration of hiding email addresses from sites?
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On 7/18/11 10:34 AM, Pete Rowley wrote:

> This is a rather elaborate scheme to solve a problem that need not
> exist in the the first place.

Maybe it need not exist, but it does. Every web site we've seen that
does OpenID immediately asks for an email address. (We're not picking on
OpenID here, this would likely apply to any directed-identity system.)
So we're not causing any leakage. If anything, once the email address
exchange is mediated by the browser, then the browser can facilitate the
creation of aliases, which means we'll likely be facilitating pseudonymity.

> The description of your practice regarding revealing your email
> address demonstrates why that information leakage is undesirable.

But... Lloyd exlained that we can very easily deliver aliased email
addresses. So how is that undesirable?

What's going on is that web sites *need* a way to recontact their users.
If you don't give them a way, they will ask the user for a way. So, we
give them a way. But since we do it with browser mediation, we have the
opportunity to put that recontacting mechanism more under the user's
control, with aliases that forward.

If you disagree with the premise that web sites want email addresses
because it's a universal re-contact mechanism, I think you may be
wishing for a different world than the one we have.

-Ben


 
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