For the abovementioned reason that life is too short, did not read the entire tl;dr thread linked above, but the core objection seems to be that email accounts are fungible. Given the operational experience with Cydia, I will accept at face value that this is a serious real-world problem. What seems wrong to me is throwing up our hands and casting our lot with either of two giant incumbents whose main motivation here is obtaining a constant stream of information on people using their authentication interfaces.<p>I think it would be highly useful to have a successful open standard for this not controlled by a commercial third party with a financial interest in the implementation.<p>To the point on account recovery and its pitfalls, any argument that reduces to &quot;System A is better because (in my opinion) those accounts are changed&#x2F;deleted less often&quot; seems like handwaving. This argument can make any proposal the winner, I myself have no hard data on account churn for any major service, although I accept that email accounts are probably higher turnover than services that introduce user lock-in ... by things like supporting a single sign-on (i.e. Facebook Connect). But WHAT IF an authentication system relied on email accounts, for example. Perhaps users would then be motivated to maintain such accounts for the purpose if it being their auth key.<p>Finally on the topic of recovery, many services already support the use of a mobile number for this, since these are portable. Implementing this as part of a Persona implementation would seem to address the &#x27;I&#x2F;someone else threw away my key&quot; problem.