> Just a traditional password reset email will do Well yes, I would much prefer that to sending in a picture of my drivers license, only logging in from one IP

> Just a traditional password reset email will do Well yes, I would much prefer that to sending in a picture of my drivers license, only logging in from one IP address, etc. This only really happens with financial sites. For normal sites, before there were captchas, they required email to sign up, in order to deter spam. Then when they got captchas they still required both, probably because they were thinking "oh yes 2 is better than 1", even though email verification does not deter spam one bit these days. On the other hand, in more recent times you now have all these sites requiring email for recovery. You can see where the dogma came about. I myself would absolutely never want email recovery, simply because it links the accounts together unless I make a separate email for each, wastes my time (I never lose my passwords, and they are unique for every account), and now the email provider has access to my account. If this isn't bad enough, facebook, google, and pretty much every mainstream email provider now require a cell phone to sign up, and sends a verification code to your cell (this may be because I use tor). It only seems to be going downhill. There's no reason not to be infuriated. On the upside, South Korea recently abolished its law that users should use their id online: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444082904577606794167615620 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044408290... ... but it's replaced with SMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number#Online_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number#O...