Now ever since I got a label printer I made it a habit to… well… label everything. It’s been the a gamechanger in organizing my stuff.

This habit includes having a tiny label with my street address and mail address on most any item that I loan away or tend to regularly lug around with me as a general reminder of ownership. I forget about and lose stuff all the time, so this gives me some piece of mind with most of my medium-value little gadgets. I believe (and have experienced) that people are generally decent and will return lost stuff to me if it’s easy for them to find out to whom it belongs.

Now it has occurred to me that this practice might be detrimental when applied to a smart cards in general and my Yubikeys in particular. After all, shouldn’t a lost Yubikey be considered “tampered with/permanently lost” anyway, whether it’s returned or not? And wouldn’t an Email address on the key just increase the risk of some immediate abuse of the key’s contents, i.e. GPG private keys, that would otherwise not be possible?

Or am I overhtinking this?