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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

In order to create an incentive for a solution to the problem of fraud which occurs when an entity takes insufficient steps to identify you it would be helpful to avoid using the term identity theft.

Companies like to normalize the concept that it is our problem if they do something like opening an account based on widely available public information instead of taking more care in identifying a person. By calling what has happened identity theft it deflects the responsibility from them. You have had your identity stolen and they are victims as much as you? That's preposterous. It's a fraud which has been perpetrated on them and should have nothing to do with you or your identity.

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Yep! This is highlighted in a fantastic Mitchell and Webb sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

I totally agree with you in theory, but someone went and created debt in my name. That is a form of theft. They used my identity to commit a theft. When I was filing a police report, they were talking about how to file it, as fraud, theft and/or identity theft. I thought it was funny that I was considering the semantics of what type of theft it was as well. I agree that the problem is with the system, but I don't think calling it something else will remove the current onus on the individual vs. the company. Anyways, at the end of the day we were both defrauded.

What I do take issues with is how easy they make it with no compensation. Someone opened an account in my name in a state I haven't been to in 10 years while I was 3000 miles away on the other coast. In the end, I felt like I should have been paid for my time from the company that let this happen because at the end of the day they felt to me like an accomplice.

In the example of a debt in your name, bank was defrauded by someone fooling their staff or computer systems—why should their broken security victimize you?

Identity theft implies something was stolen from you. In fact, that something (your very identity) is unalienable—whatever you do, you are as you as you ever were. The contrary is an oxymoron.

> Identity theft implies something was stolen from you. In fact, that something (your very identity) is unalienable—whatever you do, you are as you as you ever were. The contrary is an oxymoron.

This conflates a metaphysical concept ("identity" as "who one is") with a legal and financial concept ("identity" as "who is authorizing a loan").

The person falling victim to identity theft is still the same person ontologically, but quite a different person financially.

There is a line of feasibility—if John Smith has my face, my fingerprints and all of the passwords, John Smith is not me yet an ordinary institution can reasonably claim that beyond their sophistication to detect—but we are far from approaching that line when we speak of modern identity theft. Today it often sounds more like “someone stole from us by fooling our staff so we will just go ahead and reimburse ourselves from your account, thanks!”

Also, I am not a lawyer (are you?), but I don’t think there is a legal concept of “identity” that is somehow different from the metaphysical I of a person. I could be wrong though.

(I hate to make this argument because in a non-ideal world with malicious actors it appears to advocate for zero-trust dystopia with pervasive biometric checks, which is not my intention.)

> at the end of the day they felt to me like an accomplice.

Precisely, it’s a racket. The financial institutions take other people’s money, create more out of thin air to lend to other people while not checking very much whether they are who they claim they are so they can maximize their interest income, and offload most of the risk onto the government and strangers.

I agree with you to the extent that the conversation should basically be "it's not my fault you were dumb enough to lend money to someone who pretended to be me" and it is 100% the institutions fault. In practice though, I find advocating for language change to be a completely empty gesture. There should be clearer laws or precedents about who is liable, and it seems clear it should be "buyer beware" - for greater clarity by buyer I mean to include the lending institutions. If I lend someone money without properly vetting them, it's obviously going to be on me. It should be no different for institutions.

and if the institutions are "criminally" negligent in their actions? yea, it's fine to tell joe shmoe down the street that it's their fault they trusted an institution, but we have laws about this regarding large companies falsely or not "read, it may be in 35000 pages of text agreed to with a button click" claiming to be secure while not, taking advantage of peoples ignorance or more rightly, being busy, that those who claim anything implicit, whether legal or not, should be the ones to shoulder the burden.

There has been a science developed around "how much can we get away with" and that's the problem. Do you expect joe shmoe to have that kind of budget?

Calling it "identity theft" is like saying it's the fault of the person you called when you dial a wrong number on the phone.

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