Identity
An identity is one address on one channel belonging to one person: an email address, a phone number, a WhatsApp number. It is how an arriving message finds its person, and it is the smallest unit of *how someone reaches you* — never a guess, and never your own address.
What an identity actually is#
One value, one channel, one owner. someone@example.net on email is one identity; +91 90000 00000 on voice is another; the same number on WhatsApp is a third, because the channel is part of what an identity is. All three can belong to the same person, and that is the point of the record existing separately.
Resolution runs on every inbound piece of work: the sender's value is matched to an identity, the identity names the person, and the conversation, the memory and the relationship all follow from that. When the value is unknown, a new identity and a new person are created rather than the message being attached to a near-match.
Identity is not endpoint#
This is the confusion worth the most attention, because the two words describe the same kind of thing from opposite ends of a conversation.
| Identity | Endpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| Whose | The other party's | Yours |
| Examples | A customer's email address; their mobile number | One of your mailboxes; one of your phone numbers |
| What it resolves to | A person in your relationships | Which of your addresses handled the work |
| What it scopes | Memory and autonomy at the contact tier | Memory and autonomy at the endpoint tier |
Both appear in the same narrowest-first hierarchy, which is why they get mixed up. *Endpoint* is one mailbox or one number of yours — a support address that may answer autonomously while a director's does not. *Identity* is one address of theirs. A rule set on the wrong one of those two applies to everybody or to nobody.
Two more things it is not#
- A sign-in
- Signing in to Connect is Google OAuth and belongs to platform identity, outside every workspace. The word *identity* on this page never means an account you log in with.
- A verified fact about a human
- An identity is an address that has behaved as though it belongs to someone. Addresses are shared, forwarded and inherited, and nothing here proves the human on the other end.
When resolution goes wrong#
- A shared address.
info@reaching three colleagues resolves to one person, because that is all the channel offers. Treat memory scoped to it accordingly. - A new address for a known human. Creates a second person; merge them, and check the memory on the record you keep.
- A number that changed hands. The identity carries the previous owner's history until someone moves it. Nothing detects this automatically.
- A forwarded message. The sender is the forwarder, not the original author, and the identity resolved is theirs.
Questions#
Can one identity belong to two people?
No — the model is one identity, one person, which is what makes resolution deterministic. A genuinely shared address is a single person record standing in for whoever is behind it.
Is a WhatsApp number the same identity as the phone number?
No. The channel is part of the identity, so the same digits on voice and on WhatsApp are two records attached to one person — which is what lets a block apply to one and not the other.
How do I add an identity I know about?
Attach it to the person on the relationships screen. Adding a known address is different from research inventing one, and only the first is something Connect will do.