IRS Awards Equifax $7.25M Contract to Help 'Verify Taxpayer Identities'

Yes, that is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. Accessibility is another issue.

* Do replacements cost money?

* Do I have to go somewhere in person to get the card? Is it within walking distance?

* What are the days and the hours that this place is open?

* ... (there are so many more questions but most importantly)

* How do we pay for it?

A national ID card would be better for those kinds of people. You'd get one once and then be able to vote with it and you wouldn't have people at polling stations lying to you about what ID you needed.

It wouldn't stop the issue of Republicans closing polling stations in minority communities, but it's a start.

Except that debate is dishonest because if the republicans actually cared about voter security the obvious response to "minorities don't have access to ID" is "okay, lets fund a program to get everyone ID".

Of course the democrats fall for the trap every time, because using security as an excuse for taking away rights is almost as good as using child porn as an excuse for censorship and monitoring. People go "oh yeah, that sounds reasonable"

Why would I want my USB adapter delivered to my dry cleaner instead of my home or workplace?

Literally none of those things require a national ID anyway. You can just give them that information, if you want to.

The ID only allows to it to happen without your consent. Including all the things you don't want, like price discrimination.

I fail to see enough advantage in such a system to go along with that idea.

> So don't give them one.

If one exists then they'll use it without your permission. Or refuse service to anyone who doesn't provide it. Which means it needs to not exist.

> Doesn't mean the government should have issues identifying people when needed (for government services, for example).

Any government agency is free to give you an ID card used to identify you to that agency in the future, the same as any private entity -- but then companies can't require you to have one because not all citizens interact with any given agency. And then nothing stops you from closing any account in good standing and reopening a new one with a different ID number.

Correlating every interaction you have with government is not a feature. The IRS does not need to know who has applied for a hunting license or vice versa. The FBI should not have access to the list of books you've checked out from the public library. These things should all be separate from each other.

I always get my name wrong on legal websites because my legal name is Abdul-Rasheed Bustamam.

Many sites, like the DMV, don't allow hyphens in names. So my other name is Abdul Rasheed Bustamam.

Some sites don't like hyphens or spaces. So I become Abdul R Bustamam. R being my middle initial, and I don't have a middle name.

Then, some sites have a length limit so I often become Abdul Rashee Bustamam.

These are for organizations like insurance, government, credit cards; when I checked and froze my credit I counted about eight different "legal" names that I have.

I use a password/email manager to manage passwords, but unfortunately there's no name manager :)

That's the thing. We have to move away from passwords and to private keys stored on devices. All you have to do is carry your device or smart watch to identify yourself.

If you don't have it, you can still authenticate via biometrics at those places where you previously made an account. But biometrics only works in person, because remotely it is susceptible to replay attacks.

I worked for a company that had an online store. When we updated our payment flow, our developer added a small javascript snippet to auto-detect card type from card number. Now we didn't need users to choose 'Visa' from the drop-down anymore, we just had fields for 'name on card', 'card number', etc. and then a set of faded-out card issuer icons that would highlight based on which card type you'd typed in.

A huge number of purchases started failing because users, confused, would type 'Visa' into the 'Name on card' field instead of their own name, and then wouldn't bother putting their own name into any of the other fields.

He ended up changing the HTML to have a drop-down which was completely ignored on the backend just so we wouldn't have failing purchases and a huge support load anymore.

In other words, when presented with a card form that didn't ask what type of card it was, people assumed that inputting the card type (which a graphic made very clear was highlighted already) was more important than putting the cardholder name in.

We learned a lot of other lessons on that project about not assuming people could ever figure things out on their own.

This is just mind boggling to me:

> "Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a big deal if the USPS notified residents by snail mail when someone signs up for the service at their address, but it doesn’t."

That should be part of the authentication to enable the service (enter a code on the mailer to finalize setup). The fact that it doesn't send anything is just mind boggling.