Using Email as an Identifier

Hello all,

There’s been an ongoing discussion in the Open Badges community about using email addresses as an identifier when a wallet is not being used. This is a dilemma particularly in the Open Badges community because it has been using email addresses as recipient identifiers. Over the years using emails as identifiers has been problematic in numerous ways especially considering that the recipients don’t have control over their email addresses and in the past has led to lost badges. Even still, it’s a challenging topic especially because DIDs are a new concept and not as easy to understand as email yet.

The VC spec indicates that if an identifier is used in the credentialSubject that it should be a URI. An email could be described by a URI and also, from what I can tell, it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to use did:web to point to an account that has an email address associated with it.

Please note that I personally don’t support using email addresses or even references to email addresses as identifiers (on the fence about the did:web accounts approach as a bridge) but I’m curious to hear the community's thoughts on this and wonder if there are any wallets that would consider supporting email identifiers in some form should Open Badges recipients want to move their badges to a wallet at a later time? 

Thanks,

K.

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Kerri Lemoie, PhD
Director, Digital Credentials Research & Innovation
badgr.com <https://info.badgr.com/> | concentricsky.com <https://concentricsky.com/>
she/her/hers