Identity management is a very hard problem a <i>lot</i> of systems identify people by, or anchor trust to an email address, that <i>mostly</i> works, but has some very gnarly edges[0]. I don't think a private company can solve this (the company itself becomes a point of failure, what if they go out of business, or are acquired and change line of business?)<p>I really wish the USPS would get into managing digital identity, or at the very least, attack the lowest of hanging fruits: assign everyone[1] an email address that won't suddenly be closed for ToS violation on a domain that won't expire in anyone's lifetime. Lost your password/authenticator? Walk into a post office with your government issued identity.<p>Cleverer people than I am should be able to figure out how to create anonymous identities from your official one and have them linked unidirectionally, i.e. Alice can voluntarily prove she owns/created the Alana identity, but it's otherwise computationally impossible/expensive to do the reverse (unmask Alice from just the Alana pseudo ID)<p>0. Losing access to a mailbox means losing access to account recovery functionality, and mailbox takeovers result in TFA.<p>1. This is US-centric, but hopefully an international standard may be set, so that governments or delegated authorities are responsible for basic online identity; just like the way TLD's are managed