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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

> I say no, [photo IDs] would not solve it. (...) How would ever more restriction, requirement and verification, have helped here?

This almost starts to sound like an Onion article: "No way this can possibly work," Americans saying about yet another system implemented by virtually every nation in the Western World(TM).

The whole point of a national photo ID system is that it's the government's responsibility to provide its every citizen a functional ID. Which has its shortcomings, but it's miles better than everyone implementing their own ID system anyway in incompatible ways and then all citizens trying to figure out which one to use where.

There's a strong parallel with a national healthcare system, which is also objected by a lot of Americans on the ground that the mythical government will never get it right.

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The article doesn't mention creating a national identification card in the USA nor does it talk about implementing any kind of nationwide identifier. Instead the on-boarding process for ID.me is described.

In my opinion the poster is correct: uploading one of the many state issued identification cards, all which vary quite a lot, is not going to solve this problem.

First adversary to "crack the code", will then use the photo selfie system to defraud everyone. And then government will most likely come after the persons stolen identity for compensation.

You could deepfake someone in realtime using publicly available photos. I don't know what the answer is, but photo biometrics sounds like a, "this can't possibly be hacked because I wouldn't know how to hack it scenario". Like when a naive person takes a jumble of shift, xor, and, to create a random number generator and then it turns out it has a cycle of 1024.

I think there's a confusion happening here between photo ID (an identification the government issues to citizens) and being required to submit photos of oneself and other documents to access government services.

I'd be okay providing those documents to the government. I'm not okay providing those documents to a third-party for-profit company.

This is exactly my problem. No one should be required to hand over their personal data to a private company in order to access government benefits. If the government wants to verify my ID fine, but that data should never go to anyone else or be used for profit.

I Finland we essentially have third-parties providing strong single sign on verification.

This is just verification though, all the communication goes directly to government after it...

Might require issuing some type of new ID number for each citizen, but once that is in place it would massively simplify all the processes.

Exactly the same thing that's been happening across all Europe I guess, in Italy we call it SPID (digital identity public system). Once you give them your ID and you're certified, you can access ANY public office or system via that ID. I love it.

Yes, but you see Europe has functional privacy and consumer protections laws. The USA has functional legalized highway robbery as long as it's done by corporations laws.

> submit photos of oneself

Clearly you haven't used system like this - it's pretty sophisticated sequence of light flashes to manages to somehow fingerprint that you'r not faking it.

Used it in few systems for years and it works great. One of them scanned my passport via NFC, another one just asked my details (name, DOB).

We're already at the point where I can deepfake a person from a single photo, I'm not convinced biometric data is useful at all.

There's this old idea (~10 years old) of having the USPS become a PKI-token agency, especially because USPS already has the infrastructure to physically deliver items to every house in the USA.

These physical tokens can be as simple as a randomly-generated QR-code, or a full and proper PKI physical token / smartcard system (or anything in between).

Furthermore, USPS needs more traffic / package deliveries (especially since its lost Amazon as a customer). Increasing the amount of goods flowing around physically in the USPS system is definitely a benefit, especially if its for ensuring the physical security of these hypothetical security tokens.

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IE: The USPS is uniquely situated to become a premier ID of the US government. Certainly more situated than the current standard, the Social Security Administration. Or the loose confederation of ~48 "RealID" state drivers license.

> There's this old idea (~10 years old) of having the USPS become a PKI-token agency

I remember common discussion of this in the early 90s, so way more than 10 years.

It does make a lot of sense. For the vast majority of people the local post office is the nearest federal government office. And the post office already handles passport applications.

The USPS is completely incompetent and led by people like DeJoy who are committed to making sure the USPS continues to decline. I don’t see what you are suggesting ever happening. Republicans would fight it tooth and nail.

> especially because USPS already has the infrastructure to physically deliver items to every house in the USA.

Not accurate. I live very close to San Francisco, but I have to get my mail at a Post Office because the USPS doesn't deliver to my door.

While you're technically correct, that's the worst kind. Surely you aren't arguing against their real point that the USPS is the most equipped federal agency for getting items to people, and for having the physical real estate proximity to people to be convenient?

These systems work by flashing screen in some coloured patterns + live feed so you're not gonna fake it.

Generally I agree with you however

It doesnt work here. As a progressive we keep chasing these goals and somehow they simply get perverted to be even worse for the taxpayer in the end. i.e. you must have RealID however you must also pay for RealID. You can get paid time off from work to vote or benefits if you have a job, but only if you're a full time employee. Womp! a ton of people are no longer full time employees

How do we find our way out?

I think a big part of the problem is worrying about all these edge cases and how people will take advantage of these services. Means testing is a prime example. We should be making more services free and open to everyone. Jeff Bezos, a homeless person, and I all have equal right to use government services. None of us should have to pay for our ID. Just give it to us all for free and if necessary raise the taxes on the people who would have paid for these services out of pocket. That improves buy in as now everyone is receiving the same level of benefit and it allows us to remove a lot of bureaucratic bloat that has built up over all these programs trying to assess an individual's eligibility.

I would argue that the edge cases are simply propped up political tools so that people can keep creating these inequalities.

America, it feels like, is egalitarian in the fact that we all have the ability to sell our souls to be rich. Some folks have a headstart certainly, but there are less blocks to our success than there are in places where family pedigree and class play an even bigger role from England and France to India and S. Korea.

In Chicago, PTO is accrued at a minimum rate of 1 hour of PTO per 40 hours worked regardless of employment type or status. You guys should get with the times in the rest of the nation.

Pretty depressing that you have been conditioned to think 6.5 days of PTO a year is "with the times". That is abysmal compared to our peer nations.

It's better than the rest of the nation...

Is this post satirical? You can't seriously be holding Chicago up as an example of anything worth copying.

Lol, that's not the flex you seem to think it is.

thinking it’s a flex is missing the interesting point. Which I believe would be that PTO should be progressive and be accrued by hours worked. There shouldn’t be a requirement to be a “full time” employee before PTO is accrued because businesses can easily have people work slightly less than 40hrs/week with minimal loss to operational efficiency. If PTO accrued over hours worked regardless of full time status, businesses would have much less incentive to circumvent the system.

Let’s say we have a system where 40 hours worked = 1 day PTO:

- the business may choose to split the 40 hours among 4 employees working 10 hours each.

- however, needing to hire more employees to cover the same 40 hours (which one person alone could have handled in the legacy system) increases training and recruiting costs 4x (worst case hopefully) for each role.

- instead of circumventing the PTO “cost” altogether, the businesses would be forced to budget for it no matter how creative they get with staffing.

- budget-wise, the increased cost of PTO would effectively also be increasing the hourly wage. Further forcing businesses to scrutinize the roles they offer and question if it is really necessary to have a human being perform that function.

We Europeans pay for id cards as well? It's part of being a society, getting these things fixed every 6 years or what not, having vaccines etc, it's not discrimination but Americans swear by their so called personal freedoms so you never get nowhere.

You're barking at the wrong tree. America already has photo IDs. It's state-based, but federalizing it wouldn't change anything relevant to the question. The system in question is in addition to the photo IDs.

It almost looks like you've seen some familiar words and decided to dump your objections to imagined American backwardness compared to Europe, even though the matter in question has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Most people already have a NFC enabled card + PIN + NFC enabled smartphone. I presume banks in US go in long lengths to verify your identify. Dunno if there's any technical reason why this could work for receiving payments or verifying your identity again.

I’d say that there’s a pretty significant gap between “we’ve given you a federal ID for free, and you’re obligated to use it” and “you must provide your own photo ID to access government services, and we may or may not accept it”.

The former is about the government fixing its own mess, the latter foists responsibility for dysfunctional government systems onto individuals who may or may not do the correct song and dance to please whichever agency they’re dealing with. If we’re going to demand photo ID everywhere, the government should fix its own crap first before demanding more of the citizens.

I’d be fine with getting a federal ID and using it for my taxes. I’m deeply opposed to having to provide my own photo to fill out my taxes, especially since if they’re unhappy with my photo for whatever inscrutable reason, they can throw me in jail for not doing my taxes right.

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