The issue is that in practice, names *do* in fact get recycled by not-so-careful admins. On rare occasions it may even be the right thing to do - it's up to the administrators to make a judgement call.
There is a difference regarding what we've been dealing with for years. If I delete an email account and recreate the same email address, the new user doesn't have access to the old user's emails. But waves are shared objects, they're not stored in a user's account, and they may not even be stored on the same server due to federation. So by taking over the address, I now might have access to the previous user's personal correspondences. Adding an opaque id doesn't solve the general confusion that might happen if a new person takes over an address, but it does solve the more serious issue of giving access to someone else's data. As an aside, this might also allow us to implement a relatively painless way for a user to change their address, or to implement aliases. Dan Στις 24 Μαρτίου 2011 9:59 π.μ., ο χρήστης James Purser <[email protected]> έγραψε: > On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 9:35 PM, Daniel Danilatos <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Currently, ParticipantId contains an email address. This is not a >> stable long term identifier for a user, and can cause problems. For >> example, let's say "Bob Smith" [email protected] leaves the >> organisation, and then someone else "Bob Jones" takes over the same >> address [email protected]. Jones could then potentially gain access to >> Smith's waves. >> > > The problem is that any identifier needs to be human readable. The > blah@blahapproach that has been borrowed from email actually works > quite well. In > terms of dealing with naming collisions, people have been dealing with it > for many years now in email, IM and other fields. For instance in your > example above, if there was an existing "[email protected]" for Bob Jones and > Bob Smith comes along, Mr Smith would simply be given "[email protected]" > or some other variation on the name. > > Generally I think we should leave this bit up to the admins who, being used > to sorting this out will no doubt already have naming conventions for their > users (Generally 2, one they use publically and one they use privately). > > -- > James Purser > Collaborynth > http://collaborynth.com.au > Mob: +61 406 576 553 > Wave: [email protected] >
