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Comment by xzel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.)

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