I’m not an expert but in theory it doesn’t sound like a bad thing as long as you allow people to change it whenever possible. It feels like people change jobs, phone numbers, usernames, locations, genders, names and yet it’s extremely unlikely that they will out and out delete their old email address so it’s always something to personally identify someone by.
Comment on Tarkov not allowed email change...
Nougat@kbin.social 8 months ago
You'd be surprised by how many services use your email address as the key piece of information to identify your account with them. It is a horribly stupid practice.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Nougat@kbin.social 8 months ago
There's plenty of reasons someone might want to discard an email address. You'd even be surprised by the number of people who use their current work email as their personal email.
One of the reasons we cannot reuse email addresses from terminated employees is because there are applications - legacy internal and external third party - which use email address as the identifier. This creates other problems with naming.
I went into some additional detail in another comment nearby.
Jackinopolis@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
What else is reasonable to use to uniquely identify users? A username they’ll forget? A phone number maybe? But who wants to give their phone number to some company? We could use SSN like Korea, but that’s way too far for a typical user.
Nougat@kbin.social 8 months ago
You want to use a value which will never change, so you don't use anything the user provides at all. When a user creates an account, that account is assigned a unique identifying value by the application. This is how objects are identified in Active Directory, for example: each user, computer, group, etc. gets a Security Identifier (SID). That SID never changes. Every other property of the object can be changed.
Basically, the key value to say "this account is this account" should never ever have any other purpose.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 8 months ago
Correct. It’s not malicious, it’s just bad programming.
ultratiem@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Bad code is malicious, change my mind.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Okay, as a software dev, allow me to change your mind:
Bad code is no more malicious than bad writing, bad ideas.
It’s like arguing that everyone who’s ever had a bad idea or a poorly structured sentence was a troll and not just some moron.