Email at birth
Personally I think making sure kids have braincells at birth is a lot more important than making sure they get an email address at birth. Just to prove my point, as a fine example of what happens when you don’t make sure the newborn has any braincells, one of those in Malaysia decided that all babies in the Malaysian state of Perak will be issued with email addresses when they are born.
I’d say it’s a bloody idiotic idea, but I just don’t think the idea is good enough to warrant this compliment.
Email addresses are not hard to come by. Plenty of free email service providers out there, and as a general trend this will likely continue. It’s very unlikely that by the time these kids will grow up there won’t be any way for them to get an email address. Even if for some reason all free mail accounts will disappear, surely the ISPs would be able to keep providing an address as a part of the Internet connection package.
Giving an individual email at birth, state issued, also runs a large risk of this address becoming a mandated one for all official interactions. Government services, at least, could refuse to work with other addresses. This is a privacy issue. Not only that, but it is a huge risk of identity theft. Anyone compromising the official address could very easily pretend to be the holder. And these addresses could be incredibly hard to discard or change.
There is also the matter of getting tied to a legacy system. The chance of a single web service provider, even a state/government run one, being active in exactly the same way for the lifetime of an individual, is small. Things change, technologies change, features change. If you have an account from some random provider, you can switch and move. If it’s government issued, you can’t. And governments are notoriously bad at keeping up with the forefront of technology, so it’s likely that very soon the email services they provide will be out of date, and will never catch up.
And I expect it will be many years between birth time, and the time a child will actually be able to use an email account. So why issue something like that so many years in advance?
They seem to be making a large investment, that will probably cost a lot of time and money, in order to solve a non-problem using very inferior methods. Don’t they have anything better to do over there?
Via Loose Wire. Jeremy Wagstaff also quotes the entire article in his post there, so if the above link is dead, check this.
June 2nd, 2005 at 13:58 EET | Categories: Web |
Track comments.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
