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Comment by throwawaygulf | Hacker News Reader

I'm just starting to forge documents for this garbage. School records? Easy, download them, change my address to one a few miles away in the same city, change a few numbers of my SSN, etc. Same goes for utility bills, financial records, etc.

Fuck the data miners. The isn't even criminal to do because I'm not defrauding anyone. The address is still one in my city. They never do any actual verification so it always works.

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An alternative is to redact any unnecessary information. More people should know/do this. Proof of residency should only require state or zip code. Send in a DL with everything but your name and state blacked out. If they push back, then they will be forced to justify why they need the other info. Remember they rely on your league fees to exist.

Much better to push back directly than to cry foul/play a victim/complain. Sovereign individual and all that. Yet I see a lot of the latter on this forum.

I think it's at least as useful to cry foul so that more people learn about it than to expect everyone to start appropriately redacting their information. You and I might do that, but a huge number of people wouldn't bother.

I was automatically issued a New York license to an out of state address once. They aren't foolproof documents.

Much better to not push back directly and to cry foul/play a victim/complain anonymously unless you want to draw attention to yourself, get banned, and make getting unbanned a second part-time job.

> they will be forced to justify why they need the other info.

This is a fantasy. Pushing to this extent is not putting your kid into Little League, it's making arguing with Little League a lifestyle and personality. You really have to desire the warm glow of finding out that they've changed their policies long after your kid had to find something else to do because he/she never spent a second in Little League.

> I'm just starting to forge documents (...) The isn't even criminal to do because I'm not defrauding anyone

Some might see sending forged documents as fraud; you'd intentionally deceive an organisation for personal gain, i.e. more privacy. (TINLA)

Just to be clear, I also want more privacy; at the same time I'd prefer a different approach, e.g. shaming plus boycotting.

More practically, if you get caught then your kid probably gets banned from the league. This might be pretty hard to explain to a younger child in terms that would make them appreciate that you're doing it for the right reasons.

Do you think little league has the investigative powers of the FBI or something?

This can and does come up when, say, you have a team for 10 year olds and one of the kids looks like they drove themselves to practice. A coach can challenge the other team’s paperwork, in which case the challenged coach digs it out and everyone looks at the evidence. If it seems to be faked and the umpire agrees, the cheating team forfeits, and the kid’s parents (and possibly the coach if they were in on it) can be banned.

No, Little League doesn’t do a top secret clearance check on every player. Individual players may be checked if it’s believed they’re cheating though.

That's not what fraud means. If that were fraud, then any lie to anyone would be fraud.

> If that were fraud, then any lie to anyone would be fraud.

Not really, unintentional and/or harmless lies wouldn't be fraud.

> That's not what fraud means.

Could you elaborate? What does fraud mean according to you?

>Not really, unintentional and/or harmless lies wouldn't be fraud.

Yes really. Intentional or unintentional lies to anyone would be considered fraud if we go by your ideas.

>Could you elaborate? What does fraud mean according to you?

It's not what it means according to me, it's the definition according to the law: "with intent to defraud". Changing or redacting documents without the intention of defrauding is by definition not fraud. QED.

> Intentional or unintentional lies to anyone would be considered fraud if we go by your ideas.

It seems you’ve misunderstood my earlier comment.

> the definition according to the law: "with intent to defraud"

Defining “fraud” with “defraud” feels a bit circular.

What’s even more asinine is that the big credit burros already provided identity as a service — I guess they don’t want to pay for that.

Those jackasses¡

That costs a lot of money.

“They” don’t pay — “you” as the customer pay.

This service is fundamentally broken. You call them on the phone and someone who seems to be located in an overseas call center asks you about your credit history. If the information on his screen does not match the information you provide, you fail identity verification. If you try to escalate they instruct you to photocopy your driver license and social security card and mail them the photocopy.

Source, tried to get electricity in Tampa, Florida, after leaving the military. Was denied because TECO only was willing to “verify” my identity through Experian, and Experian <see above>.

This sounds like a good problem to solve. Give me your address, and if someone asks, and you are ok with, i can verify you live in said (country/county/city) but not tell the exact location.

Obviously, there is a problem of trust in the first place to solve, but i fee like this sort of data escrow could be useful to a lot of people.

Useful as well to overreaching governments and law enforcement. Certainly not the type of thing you could legally inform your customers of, either.

Dat escrow -- this is basically what background check orgs providers, right? Assuming you don't need to provide something like your social.

I like to use the names of famous serial killers and mass murderers when I don't feel like giving my real one.

So far, no one has called me on it.

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