Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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In Germany, the combination (Name, Address, Date of Birth) is assumed to identify you uniquely.

For authentification you just show your ID card that contains both your name, date of birth, and your official address. If you move you have to notify authorities and get an official sticker on your ID card showing the new address. By law, everyone is required to own either an ID card or a passport to be able to identify yourself in front of police or a court.

Of course various governemnt agencies have their own identification numbers for you, for example you have a tax id that you will have to share with your bank, and another id for social security that you will have to share with your employer, etc. But those are just for reporting to various government databases and are never a form of authentification. You first prove who you are with your ID card, then you exchange id numbers for relevant systems.

(our IDs also have numbers, but you can get a new ID card as often as you want and nobody outside the government can do anything useful with it. We had some bad experiences with government databases, so it's now a number of unconnected smaller databases)

What about over the phone or online though? How do you show that you are you?

I'm in Czech Republic, but I guess the practice will be similar in Germany.

It depends on the degree of verification you need. You can just post a scan or a photo of your ID, you can send a small wire transfer because banks have to verify the account owner, there is an OpenID provider that offers authentication tied to the real world identity, a courier can come to your home to verify the ID or any combination of the methods.

Preface edit: I'm from Germany.

Usually in the same way it's done everywhere else: name, date of birth, registered/current address, sometimes an additional pin/security question/etc, depending on who you're calling.

If it's official business you might be required to send an actual letter, though I doubt they ever check your signature unless you're suing them.

If it's online and state business (portal for unemployment stuff, state employee pension details, etc.), you usually have to provide your name and address first, which they then check against your registered address. They'll then send you a letter with a one-time password you can use to register your account.

Edit: Modern E-Business companies often require you to "verify" your identify by ways of Postident (you present your ID to a post office) or IDnow (you present your ID to a random guy via webcam who asks you to move it around so he can see all holograms, data, etc.) and can compare it to your picture in the webcam.

This is considered to be enough for financial transactions according to our current money laundering laws, so it's about the most though version you can go through.

To add to this: a lot of stuff just can't be done over phone or internet unless you use postident or IDnow. For example your first interaction with any financial institution is either in person or involves you waving your id card in front of a webcam according to their instructions.

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