A popular practice is the use of a person's email address as a uniquely identifying piece of information. The foaf:mbox property is used in Friend of a Friend (FOAF) profiles for this purpose. In OWL, this kind of property is known as an Inverse Functional Property (IFP). When an agent encounters two resources with the same email address, it can infer that both refer to the same person and can treat them as one.
It is quite careless to assume the email as uniquely identifying. While being true for examples like google and similar organisations self hosted domains and cooperation might reassign the same email address to different persons.