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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

On the other side though, if Joe is protected againstany fraud (as he is with credit cards) what's to prevent Joe from GIVING his identifying info to someone and then claiming identity theft? Or just buying stuff and claiming identity theft?

I would think that each new account or transcation should generate a notification to Joe and he should be able to reverse them within a certain amount of time.

Joe could make it so that his device ignores notifications about transactions made by his own device, and only hear about other ones.

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> what's to prevent Joe from GIVING his identifying info to someone and then claiming identity theft? Or just buying stuff and claiming identity theft?

That would be the same crime as someone using Joe's stolen credit card info - fraud.

Then the bank has incentive to shift responsibility back to you, e.g. by requiring withdrawal request to be signed with your private encryption key. And you have an incentive to care about security of this key.

Well, until the bank offers such a feature on my account then it should be on them.

There's no shared secret between just the bank and you.

Therefore the bank can't establish that it was you, who leaked the secret. (Because it's easy to leak SSN, it could have been any random company you did business with. Or the SocSecAdmin.)

And even if your shared secret was used to withdraw, there's still a chance of the bank leaking it.

So usually the shared secret's hash is stored.

This works pretty well.

Around here banks ask you to give your PIN for identification, or you have to present your ID, and they compare it with what they have on file. (So trust on first use is still important.) Sure, it's probably not hard to fake these plastic cards, but that's a rather serious crime, and then the bank can pull the security cam footage, etc...

Of course, requiring confirmation on an SMS even when you do in person banking might make sense.

And that's why the rest of the world's governments issue their own national IDs to their citizens. Heck, I have two!

I have one given to me at birth, which is a sequence of 13 numbers that gets calculated with a formula and has a control number at the end (kind of like credit card). This one is random enough for nobody be able to guess anyone else's (for example, how many babies were born before you on your birth day in that region is a relevant factor in the formula) and is used with government entities and government entities only (it is illegal for the businesses to require from you to provide that number to them to give you a service).

And I have the second one, which is the national ID number. This one was given to me when I was 18, and it serves as a proof of identity with the businesses.

And there you have it. Two distinct numbers. One for your government, and the second one for you dealing with businesses. Someone can't fake anything important (as in, government-related) with your ID, and businesses have a second number that is usually proven on the spot with the photo of you in your national ID.

Problem is solved.

Sounds like you live in a country with a compulsory national ID card.

Not all countries have or want that.

Naive question, why wouldn't someone want a national ID card? From my understanding and time in sweden (granted only 5 months) they seem like a much better system than SSN

Historically, registries of citizen identities have been used for horrendous exploitation of the public. They have been used to ease profiling, targetting, discrimination, and elimination of anyone who is politically problematic. Personally, I resist most sort of formalization or systemization of human life or identity. Any person who says "our policy doesn't mention your situation" or "the software doesn't allow that value/have a field for that" and considers this to be a problem of the person with a life that doesn't fit the mold the designers of the system fantasized about really ought to be punched in the mouth, and creation of an easily-indexed national ID is an important step in such systems.

Why do they want a NUMBER? Because names are too... human. They're messy, and they can change, and they don't fit standard forms. It's an impulse to purge the humanity from social identity that motivates establishment of national ID numbers.

Very well said!

How do you propose keeping track of people without assigning an ID number? Require everyone have a unique name?

That is the whole point. Some cultures have residual beliefs about limited government and privacy. Some sub-cultures and families in those cultures have maintained a strong believe that no one should be "keeping track" of them.

In the US at least, in theory the proposal for a long time was just to not keep track of people in the first place. The federal government collected taxes on things like property and tariffs that were hard to avoid, they performed a census once a decade to get a rough idea of how many people there were, and anything beyond that was none of their business.

Then we got income taxes and federally guaranteed pensions (Social Security) and medical assistance (Medicare/Medicaid) and a few other, smaller safety net programs. Furthermore, while there's plenty of fighting around the margins, the overwhelming majority of Americans are broadly in favor of keeping at least some of the Great Society programs, and that means we have to have a national registry of some sort.

It turns out that when the population is broadly distrustful of the idea of a national registry but broadly in support of a tax regime and social programs that require a national registry to function the stable equilibrium is a really really shitty national registry that everyone hates but nobody feels they can improve without getting shouted out of office. American politics is dumb.

In the US, ID card policies were and still are often used to disenfranchise minorities from voting. The policies behind them are often inconsistently applied and sometimes require large bureaucratic efforts to rectify. Obtaining a copy of your birth certificate in the US often means going back to your home county and visiting some municipal office for hours on end. If you work a 9-5, there's no way in hell that's happening.

Voter suppression in the United States has had a long, sordid history. Blacks were given the right to vote after the civil war, prompting southern states to implement literacy tests, poll taxes, basically any legitimate-seeming test to de-facto turn away black people at the polls. This got so bad that we literally wrote an Amendment (24th) to state "yeah you can't do this either".

What's fucked up is that this sort of thing STILL happens. This past Tuesday, a number of voters in Virginia received calls telling them to go to a different polling station from the one they were assigned. See https://theintercept.com/2017/11/07/virginia-voters-get-myst...

Stuff You Should Know did a really good episode on voter suppression in the US that I'd recommend.

Based on your phrasing it sounds like you think owning a national ID card is commonplace in Sweden. The national ID card system isn't widely used at all, most people use either their drivers license or passport when they need to identify themselves.

The only thing everyone has is a person number, and the difference is that it is explicitly considered public information and you can get anyone's person number by just asking the Tax Agency. It's just a convenient way to keep track of people, not a way to actually identify yourself.

No no no no no no no!

Absolutely not. I mean, I don't know which jurisdiction we are talking about, but I don't know of any that bases identity on a number.

The numbers don't serve as proof. They are just a number to help refer to you in databases.

The proof of identity is provided by the plastic cards and other items/papers. (Such as a birth certificate. And usually if you lose that to get a new copy you need some ID, and if you lose your ID cards, then a written statement from the police that you lost your ID card.)

Scalability. Transactions are usually pretty small compared to annual incomes so the people doing this are doing it a lot, and you will be under some scrutiny after the 75th fraud on your account this year.

This is only an issue because of tracked non-anonymous accounts. The key for money laundering in high profit / service retail businesses is using dirty anonymous cash. Often the customers literally do not exist, imaginary entries are made at the register and cash is stuffed in.

The last suggestion is easily worked around, merely trade device IDs along with account IDs. In fact the easiest way to steal money would be simply to clone your device outright complete with saved passwords etc. Joe certainly doesn't control his own device, not the firmware, OS, or apps, not to mention MITM attacks.

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