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Comment by Qwertystop | Hacker News Reader

> There are even people who are upset about the mere existence of the SSN for weird religious reasons.

The religious reason is generally about seeing insurance and/or investment as gambling, as I understand it. I wouldn't call it that weird.

> Also utility bills are a valid proof of address for some reason.

Well, yes. A utility bill means that there's a highly-regulated company that is providing you a recurring service to that address, billing you at that address. If the electric company is billing you at a house, for providing electricity to that house, presumably that is your house. It doesn't seem especially unreasonable, it's going to be more up-to-date than the record of when the house was bought or when you started a lease, and it's cheaper than sending a government employee to verify. It doesn't have to be a hard, unfalsifiable proof; it only needs to be stronger evidence than writing down whatever address you like without any checks.

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> If the electric company is billing you at a house, for providing electricity to that house, presumably that is your house.

Utility bills are ordinary pieces of paper that can easily be forged.

Even if you have a genuine one, all it proves is that the address exists in enough of a way to have its own utility meter, and that the person you're dealing with has access to the mail there. That's not nothing, but it's not a lot. People may not be on the bill (subletters etc), or the bill may be paid by an absentee landlord, etc.

Conversely, the security is terribly vulnerable to social engineering, like SMS "2FA". I know because I had a month's disruption when someone managed to order a replacement phone line to my house and cut off my internet for a month.

Utility bills are forgeable paper, yes. So is any other proof short of the strong cryptographic kind, which is going to be a lot more trouble to get set up infrastructurally. Also, forging them, or theft of mail, is a notable threshold beyond "just say you live there". Generally, in my experience, proof-of-address is coupled with some other requirement to prove your identity, so a genuine-but-stolen utility bill would need to be coupled with either a forged ID or a remarkable resemblance to the actual owner.

It's not perfect, but I would say that in most cases it's better than nothing. It's a bit lacking for of subletters, but when I've needed proof-of-address, showing the signed lease has also been acceptable.

(I actually am in a month-to-month with no lease and with a roommate's name on the utility bill, so the last time I needed proof of address I needed something else. Can't now remember what it was.)

> So is any other proof short of the strong cryptographic kind, which is going to be a lot more trouble to get set up infrastructurally.

More trouble definitely, but not crazy hard. Some creditcard companies do it in those chip cards (others just put a readable ID on the chip, which is why you still see zoe gods printing chip cards). I know the government is generally less efficient than corporations, but they've got a massive budget. They should be able to figure out how to make an ID with a cryptographic signature that verifies itself and brings up a pre-registered photo on the computer of the person verifying you that's pulled from a government database. I don't really even want the government to have power, and I believe a national ID program like the one I'm proposing would do that in ways, so I'm fine with them failing to do this... I just don't understand why they haven't yet.

It could be as simple as scanning the barcode on a drivers license, the data goes to government system, and they compare what they see. Minus the last step, this already happens at lots of places that sell beer.

If minimizing privacy invasion, they could type info they're verifying in to get a yes/no instead of seeing whole thing. There's strategies for reducing abuse of such a service, too.

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