Half of US states now using facial recognition to vet unemployment claims

Fraud should be prevented, for sure! But a private corporation black box governing access to social safety nets is not to be tolerated.

> The US Department of Labor Inspector General Office in late March estimated that at least $89 billion of the estimated $896 billion in federal unemployment program funds could be paid improperly, with a significant portion attributable to fraud. This is based on a historic improper payment rate of at least 10%.

This is lazy BS from the other side; they know for a fact that the rate of fraud is going to be higher than it was pre-COVID. We know how much has been paid out and the only question is what the fraud rate is.

I agree that you have to be skeptical given that id.me is selling a product, and to be honest, I only put two-and-two together after making my comment and revisiting the axios article since I first came across it. That being said, given how many states are using id.me, they have unique visibility into the problem and I don't think it's fair to write them off as entirely untrustworthy.

tl;dr: The number is probably between $100B and $400B. It's hundreds of billions of dollars either way.

Eventually those govts have to take some responsibility for the rampant fraud.

I’m sure “conservatives” are responsible for many ills but where I live this isn’t one of them because they were never involved. If you want to fix it, you have to be honest about the problem.

My guess is some project manager at a fraud boiler room stuck your zip code in in the “CO” folder instead of “CA”. The people who file these claims are literally on the phone all day and know what to say.

I'm sorry, that's completely ridiculous.

Is it possible that the total fraud would be lower because most businesses would prefer to follow the law and not be busted? Maybe, but it's hard to say.

In California the UI office will get in touch with your former employer to verify your claim. So there's that at least. Not to mention, what do you do when people lose their jobs because the employer has gone out of business?

States that weren’t doing it from the beginning did start checking with employers to determine if a person was actually unemployed.

I think this situation might be a strong case for better id verification and ubi. We've got the cryptographic tools, the funding, and the evidence that other systems are failing terribly. We just need the political will and legislative implementation - Yang had a great foundation for it.

So now employees are financially reliant on employer that just fired them?

The people with the strongest aversion, and who pay for the propaganda to create and maintain that aversion in others, are also people who benefit financially from government functions being outsourced to private industry.

The problem here isn't that the police aren't collecting such data themselves but rather that private companies are still allowed to. You're pointing to a massive loophole in the current regulations in order to argue against having any regulation at all. Instead, the loophole should be closed - I have no interest in living in a glass house dystopia.

Usually interstate sharing of DMV records is only allowed for law enforcement purposes. So a traffic camera can look up your records, but a permitting agency cannot.

Other uses are usually not allowed unless specified by statute. DMVs sell everything, and other agencies buy that data back from companies like ID.me and others.

It's not surprising there's now a big push to 'prove' that the pandemic unemployment benefits were wastefully expensive. It doesn't fit the neoliberal economic worldview that says government aid should be "need based" and have means testing. Of course the total dollar amount said to be lost to the waste is less than what the DoD spends in a day.

The most obviously agenda-driven aspect of this new pandemic fraud panic is that it directly plays on the American aversion to the helping the "losers" who didn't clear the "pulled up by one's own bootstraps" bar. It's the same rhetoric employed against student loan forgiveness and by the Tea Party, to name just a couple of examples.

I suppose the issue is that not everyone who collects unemployment necessarily has an ID card, and that someone with an ID card doesn't necessarily have a current mailing address (someone might be homeless or couch surfing for example). It seems like a fairly straightforward solution would be to have those people physically come in to a local licensing office.

But that would introduce accessibility issues for many (the most disadvantaged would be the most inconvenienced), hence facial recognition and video chats, but apparently the state couldn't be bothered to build out it's own system for that?

A much better solution would be to just put PKI chips into ID cards. US passports, the US DoD, many other countries, and the vast majority of credit cards have this at this point. Why not state issued photo IDs? I have no idea.

Oh yeah, and most states send unemployment electronically to a bank account. So it seems like you could just require the account to be with a bank that operates in the US and thus already complies with our rather extensive KYC laws. I have no idea why the banks themselves couldn't be used to vet their customers here.

On the whole I'm completely unimpressed.

www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/auditor-state-unemployment-system-wholly-unprepared-for-fraud-one-agency-employee-under-criminal-investigation/%3famp=1

There is another law for air carriers, and the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act does not apply once you enter an airport. For airlines/airports/flights the law is called the Air Carrier Access Act, and it applies to flights to and from the US. In that case, you may need a note from your doctor.

We shouldn't have to wear costumes, especially in America?

1 https://github.com/BruceMacD/Adversarial-Faces

2 https://towardsdatascience.com/fooling-facial-detection-with...

http://objectsinfilm.blogspot.com/2015/04/object-13-scramble...

And therefore, I suspect there will be a lot more cold and flu cases this winter than last.

Somewhere I think I read something about how masks probably prevented 40,000 flu deaths. It makes the comments about how "covid-19 is no worse than the flu" seem particularly ironic.

In today's world, the short answer is probably that there should be an iOS and Android app. That probably would have a higher average success rate than a desktop computer.

Or, at the very least, some reasonable method to prove your identity without having to use something like ID.me.