Memory/program dumps, personally copies, souls, call them what you want, are hard to get information from unless they're being run on an appropriate substrate. This is intentional because, dispite what I told you about politeness and tradition, ships tend towards an inquisitive turn of mind, and while I, of course, would never look into your mind, I'm not sure you would say the same thing.

Which means that looking at the "outside" of the alleged copy of me from too long ago gave me certain data (name, creation date, substrate details), I couldn't confirm anything without actually running it, at which point a) I'd have a second person with basically the same rights as me (including, for example, the right to continued existence) and b) it would be trivial for it to lie to me.

On the other hand, if I didn't run it, then what was I going to do with it?