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A comment on Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by bee_rider on Friday April 22, 2022 @01:50AM (#31118616)
I have had this happen to me as well. It was pretty annoying. Somebody used my name for a Twitch account. I wanted to do things the 'right way' so I didn't verify the email, didn't log in and change their password -- I contacted customer support instead (mostly just to see how it would work -- I have a very unusual name, so this is a kind of rare event for me). It took them, I think, years to delete the thing.

I've never really been 100% sure if changing the password and logging in to delete the account would violate the CFAA. I mean nobody would have gone after me for a Twitch account anyway, and I'd definitely have felt moral deleting the thing, but the letter of the law...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by 369548684892826 on Friday April 22, 2022 @02:19AM (#31118790)
If the only identifier on the account is your email address then:

- The account effectively belongs to you anyway.

- The person who created it isn't going to be able to recover it if they lose their password, better they know about this sooner than later by you locking them out.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by bee_rider on Friday April 22, 2022 @01:10PM (#31124615)
I don't think the first one is actually obvious. An account was set up. It is on Twitch's computers, and it has a password designed to keep me out. Twitch thinks they have allowed in some other person (who's agreed to their licensing agreements, etc). It seems to me that I'd be circumventing their account system using the fact that I happen to control the password recovery mechanism.

I mean this is essentially silly, because almost certainly what has happened (given my weird name that nobody would normally stumble across) is that my email address has become listed in some database and somebody has decided to use it to sign up for services for shady reasons. So I'm not arguing that I couldn't have gotten away with it. Definitely I could have. But I think it is an interesting reflection on these signup systems and how they might interact with the CFAA, that this weird situation can occur.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by 369548684892826 on Saturday April 23, 2022 @11:58AM (#31135433)
My thinking on this is that if twitch don’t verify your email before creating the account then that’s on them.
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Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by bee_rider on Saturday April 23, 2022 @01:47PM (#31136470)
Morally, I definitely agree.
[ Parent | on HN ]