It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.
Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.
This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.
Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.
If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.
Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.
Now what can we do about it?
I know this isn’t super helpful in answering your question, but it would be nice if we didn’t need to rely on technology like email for account creation at all. The domain name provider njalla allows for account creation using an XMPP address, and the VPN provider mullvad generates a random string of numbers as your username. If only the rest of the web followed suit.
Right. It’s not just about the question but looking a little deeper to get to what it means to have a free culture. What’s required. What would be done differently. This was just a specific challenge that made sense to step back a little from. If there’s a principle it should be honesty about why identifying information is required and looking for alternatives.
I personally think email is a good default because it’s standard and everyone has it. But i would appreciate if my identity on federated networks was not tied to a single server’s address, but rather to a cryptographic key like the ZOT protocol does.
It’s good it’s easy to guess where to reach me from my address. It’s also good if i can change this network location anytime if the server who gave me services goes down.