I'm glad they've got the tech right for the actual authentication, but their email relay is still far from usable. It's limited in very fundamental ways, that will prevent many companies of any scale from using it. It's very difficult to make it work with an email service such as SendGrid, and it's limited to 10 domains you can prove ownership of, and 10 specific email addresses. I work for a company that charges use…
I've rarely seen vendors sharing e-mails with payment and shipping companies, and would consider it somewhat icky for privacy reasons, especially when done without the user's consent. It also seems that you could set up your own relay allowing those providers to contact your customers. In fact, that would be the privacy-conscious alternative even to your current implementation.
This data is shared for the legitimate interests of the customer. You've bought something and asked to a) pay for it, and b) have it delivered. I think it's reasonable to expect that the companies involved in this can contact you for the purposes of fulfilling your request.
This is all done under GDPR. The companies hold the data only for as long as they need, for the purposes explicitly requested by the user. This will all be included in privacy policies.
> It also seems that you could set up your own relay allowing those providers to contact your customers.
This might be technically possible, but introduces many concerns such as deliverability and spam ratings. Relaying email in this way is non-trivial when you're doing it at scale. For services sending ~100k emails a month or more, this requires careful planning because it's very easy to become filtered as spam.