Hacker News Reader

Comment by mediascreen | Hacker News Reader

Every time I sign up for a service using our company card, with our company address and company email I feel like I'm pretty open about who the buyer is.

Wouldn't a some kind of certified bank card be an even better proof of corporate identity than a copy of someones ID?

IDs needs to be verified against articles of incorporation. For larger companies it will definitely be a hassle to get the CFO to submit their proof of identity for a purchase that is normally delegated way down in the organisation.

View on HN

Okay. Let's say I set up another web site and insist upon these documents. Now I can impersonate you.

How long until we see people signing up for Google ads using someone else's passport, W9 and what not?

This won't last very long.

> Now I can impersonate you.

Or you could just use Edward Snowden's passport, or any of the other thousands of people's IDs that have been compromised.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5441386/ethical-hacking-o...

Well, I'm not arguing for this system.

I suggested using corporate credit cards instead since there are already security mechanisms in place to handle those.

But it obviously require some form of trust in the entity you are interacting with.

It's covered in the announcement. There's no need for the CFO to get involved.

https://www.blog.google/products/ads/advertiser-identity-ver...

Is it irrational to be angry that Google got their own .google TLD and then decides to put "www" in front of its second level domain?

Seems to redirect to blog.google

No, Chrome just hides the "www." part, not sure about Firefox.

The announcement provides a short overview, there is a help page that describes the process in more detail [0]. It' only for american companies at this time, but I imagine that it won't get less complicated when it's rolled out for 180 countries with different corporate and legal systems...

The document states that you have to show that you are an authorized representative of the company. I am not that familiar with US law, but in many countries that means one of the signatories of the company, usually someone like the CEO or the CFO.

My point is that it makes sense that you are able to show that you have the right to act on the company's behalf in this matter. I just think that since the company trusts you with it's credit card and there already are systems in place to authorize expenditures, it would be logical to tie the proof that you represent the company to the card in this case.

[0] https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9703665#700

A US company will typically have a lot of employees with signatory power, not just CEO+CFO. However not nearly as many people as are issued corp cards. That is often an incredibly low barrier (e.g. at my company I believe literally every employee can get a corp card).

And it's an important legal distinction. If I sign a contract with a company and it's signed by someone with signing power, I can assume that this will have the company's backing (unless I was aware of fraud). I don't have to care if the employee got the right approval for that, the company will have to fulfill their obligations. That cannot be said for any decisions made by anyone in the company.

I believe any country knows the system of signing power. And that can usually be proven by documents. They need to publish guidelines for every country but the system stands that a company can delegate signing of any contracts to some employees.

Why not solve it at government level. My ID already has NFC chip, now it’s just matter of adding software for iOS (and hardware for macbook).

Don’t wanna use ID? No problem - sign additional tokens a bit like ssl certificate chain works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com