Mozilla BrowserID

[SitG Admin]

>Users can have multiple email addresses, from different providers, 
>and not correlate/link them. Each email address can be used as a 
>different persona, and nobody but the user will know that they 
>actually belong to the same person.

Not sure why you replied to my post, since I wasn't addressing 
correlation at all.

>Moving to an email based identity system will let users have 
>multiple choices in how they identify themselves online.

I'm not seeing it.

I could offer you multiple choices of title in my service, but that 
wouldn't really give you a choice about *whether* to serve me; the 
choices we provide to users will not only give them enough freedom to 
satisfy *some*, but shape their ideas of what freedom *is* - to the 
extent they accept the limitations we thereby impose on them, the way 
their practices *conform* to those limits will seem to reinforce and 
confirm the righteousness of whatever theory originally suggested 
they only *needed* such freedoms.

>I think the market has shown that an URL-based identity system 
>without any additional attributes (basic profile info, email 
>address) or services (the ability to send notifications to the user) 
>is not really a viable product, since the RP might as well have the 
>user register a local account.

The ability to send notifications to the user is "push"; a browser 
opens when I need it and goes where I send it, which is "pull". I am 
aware of efforts to add "push" functionality to the browser, to some 
extent, but it is mostly the automatic (or outsourced, p2p) gathering 
of data whitelisted as (or vaguely related to) my interests; there is 
no "spam", whereby an arbitrary third party can bombard me with any 
amount of unwanted (to me) communication that they desire. I do not 
see how the failure of one identifier, based in the "pull" realm, 
implies the success of one entirely based in the "push" realm.

Or has E-mail, too, evolved toward center?

-Shade