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Comment by bckygldstn | Hacker News Reader

My green card had my name correct but someone else's face printed on it! Unfortunately they didn't look at all like me, it took ages to get fixed. I wonder if someone else got my face on their card, or if they use a grumpy bald man as a placeholder in their card template.

My name is also misspelt on my social security card. I didn't bother to have that corrected and so far there have been zero repercussions.

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One more story. When applying for an Amex card they had my name as "Andre" instead of Andrew (this one is probably a typo on my end).

Before approving the application, the Amex agent did a 3-way conference call with me and an agent from my bank to confirm the details in my application.

Amex: "Can you confirm the customer's name is André?"

Bank: "Yes, I confirm the customer's name is Andrew."

Amex: "Thank you for confirming, André your application has been approved"

That's interesting that your card made it to you with the wrong photo on it. There was a visual inspection process that compared what the printed card looked like, to what it's supposed to look like, and cards were supposed to be ejected and reprinted if there was a mismatch. I worked on the machine/system that prints those cards in the late 90s. When was your card issued? I heard somewhere (and find it easy to believe) that the entire system we built was replaced with something much smaller and simpler a few years later as technology improved.

Interesting! This was ~2018.

My memory is a little hazy, but I remember having the photo taken at USCIS, walking over to a photo booth which asked to confirm some information like name or number and maybe a fingerprint too? Anyway, it wasn't a polaroid paperclipped to my forms: it seemed like a different system that would have to be linked to my application.

The images are very different: same gender, but different race, and off by about 30 years and 1 head of hair!

Oh, long after the system I worked on was replaced. Back in 1997-1999 the images were filenames in a database record, and we just read the image file and printed it on the card. Then at a later stage a camera looked at the printed card and compared it to what it should look like. We also used to 'etch' the same photograph into the 'laser' (CD-like) golden strip on the back of the card. When you wrote data to the laser strip, it changed the appearance by darkening it. There was an API library supplied by the manufacturer of the encoder drives that could write a visible image to the strip. Not sure if the modern cards still have that feature.

My name was spelt incorrectly on my driver's license for several years. No repercussions, nobody ever noticed. (Due to the nature of it, if you noticed it, it was weirder than just a vanilla typo.)

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