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Comment by dismalpedigree | Hacker News Reader

How about login.gov? Govt run. Very well done. Already used bu multiple federal agencies. Seems like a shoe in. Throw out ID.me and return their lobbying dollars for good measure.

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I've been wondering why login.gov wasn't the choice in the first place, and the only thing I can think of is that id.me seems to portray itself as a fraud-busting identity service, whereas login.gov is simply a sign-in service. So presumably anyone contracting with id.me is convinced that they can help prevent being defrauded.

What I don't understand is why any customer of id.me believes id.me's characterization of how much fraud there is, and how effective they are. How many of id.me's claims have been independently verified?

Massive amounts of online IRS fraud was a motivator, I believe.

I mean to get my online its account working I had to have them mail me a pin. (Us postal service mail…). I wondering now if my experience was unique.

Are the same legislators bringing in a private company to rectify also the ones who keep the IRS underfunded? Pretty sketchy.

Totally agree! I was just going to write this.

Login.gov supports and encourages security keys (yubikey etc) as 2FA. I hope it does see wider adoption soon by more agencies, esp IRS.

It is the primary identity provider for the Social Security Administration as of September 2021, and provides identity services for ~211 federal agency applications. IRS is one of the last holdouts.

I know a guy who worked on Login.gov, and I'm all for the government continuing to invest in 18F, the US Digital Service, etc. They've successfully recruited top talent in the past decade, although it's still not nearly as much as it could be. A couple decades ago I was reading horror stories on Slashdot about how the government pays employees peanuts and all the contractors get crazy high rates. Knowing about some of the improvements with in-house software projects in recent years, I was seriously miffed when I had to use ID.me since I knew it was a private company.

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