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Comment by katmannthree | Hacker News Reader

A tiny crypto exchange is probably in a position where they can easily get existing employees to manually verify the documents without a significant impact on their business.

In addition to needing to verify orders of magnitude more entities, google likely has many layers of both human and technical abstraction to deal with.

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But Google has millions of unpaid workers that could do part of the job: Recaptcha users.

I'm only half joking. If parts of the process can be outsourced in a responsible manner, I can't see why Google wouldn't.

This isn’t new technology by any stretch of the imagination. Banks have been required to do some version of this since the 70s. I wouldn’t buy this excuse coming from the management and technology clusterfuck that is Wells Fargo and I certainly wouldn’t buy it from Google.

Yet there has never been a global bank that supports verifying identities in almost every country.

Every bank in the US supports verifying identities in every country whether or not they have global operations. Your friendly neighborhood credit union can verify foreign identities. The only exception might be for individuals/entities in places like North Korea or Syria where it doesn’t make sense to bother with individual verification because their location alone prohibits an account.

Of course, all global banks need to verify business identification from pretty much any country worldwide. It's a manual process with large specialists teams but it's possible.

And when a new KYC regulation rolls out, the banks take a couple of years to prep and deploy it.

Yup. The account with my good bank is about 25 years old. Some time in the 2010s they sent me a letter. Basic thrust was: You have six months to provide us with documents to meet current KYC regulations or ask for more time, and if you ask for more time we'll give you another six months, and then finally we'll just cut you a cheque and close the account because we don't want to do business with you if you can't meet those regulations.

And they were clearly sending these out in waves, I wouldn't be surprised if the project took 3-5 years from "Oops, we aren't doing enough KYC and our parent bank just got hit with another multi-billion dollar fine" to completion.

How was this not already a thing? How does Google not already have a billing address on file for all the advertisers they're accepting money from? It seems like this shouldn't have ever been "voluntary information".

Having a billing address is a far cry from identify verification

If you really don't trust the the information the person has provided to give you money you probably should not be accepting their money.

THey have a payment method as well which is definitely identity verification. Don't expect this to filter everyone hiding behind fronts and shell orgs, but it's a step towards that.

The whole point is that a payment is not and identity verification

No, the point is that they may already be advising someone on how to manage a brand for a business, a business that potentially they didn't really know if that someone is actually a representative of the brand? They may be granting access to AdWords accounts to be managed by third parties, and they don't know if those third parties are who they say they are, or actually a representative of the brand they are managing? Their job is just to rake in payments from people they don't actually know? Again, did they not already have methods in place to establish some level of trust that the person on the other end is who they say they are?

Google already had a "Verify your local business" option, I wonder if this data was integrated into AdWords accounts as well. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7107242?hl=en It seems like this data should already be on file and verified if you are business advertising with AdWords.

The reason it isn't already a thing is because it would require a law on the books across all scales for business records with compliance costs - down to Billy Bob's Billboards where he takes cash for ad postings. The legal system is still based on assumptions of the government not having default access to all financial transactions as not only would it have been just useless abusable spam but it would have generated massive expenses for little gain and drawn considerable ire. Plus said proposal would trigger every Revelations literalist about "the number of the Beast" as well as privacy advocates and businessess upset at increased compliance costs and liability. Until the Fake News rise approaching moral panic absolutely nobody would be for it.

Hell if they were to try to codify such requirements it may not even survive the supreme court.

but...waving hands vaguely, what about banks and "know your customer"? If it's possible to regulate them, why not Google?

Not making an airtight detailed argument, but I feel like you must be misguided because your tone suggests that a massive societal upheaval is necessary for the sort of controls we already take for granted in certain areas.

wow maybe they should start including this problem as part of their technical interviews

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