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by NikolaNovak 955 days ago
There's any number of risk scenarios, assign likelihood as you will :

* owner of account doesn't pay, service sells the debt to collection agency, and they come after you because it matches your email and profile.

* owner of account subscribes to something unsavoury or does something illicit, which is now traceable to you

* given email is a big part of the incredibly ridiculous and overly pervasive tracking economy and profiling of the interwebs, your profile will now be even more annoying then before and be associated with things you don't want them to be.

Etc. Or just, to your point, one day they'll realize their mistake and be mad at YOU (because people aren't generally good at taking responsibility :) and now it's a thing.

I should mention I have a dozen email accounts of various degrees of protectiveness. Thia happens, annoyingly, to my most private address that I have never ever once used for business or signed up for anything, only for friends and family. So among everything else I'm peeved that my pristine email and identity is being polutted by other crap.

And again... The reason this frustrates me, is this should.not.be.and.issue in any sane world. If you're sending verification email it should have a No option. Anything else is grossly neglible or evil or both.

2 comments

I understand the problems with people using your email to register for sites. My confusion was the claim that verifying the email for some random stranger causes fewer problems than ignoring the verification email.
To make it less general and more specific

Over years, I've received peoples private medical bills; been subscribed to dating sites of various degrees of sketchiness; my email has been used to register with government agencies in countries of various degrees of sketchiness too; signed up for gaming, gambling, Crypto, banking, nft, investing, and so on - many things where my comfort level for mistakes and mistaken identity and Confusion and incorrect systems of record, is lower than "some kiddie signed me up for blizzard.net" :-/