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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

Sooner or later we're going to need a federal dept of is-this-guy-who-he-says-he-is. No startup can solve this; it's not profitable enough to do right. The last resort for authentication will always be "go to a place and talk to a human" and the gov't is the only entity who is willing/able to staff a brick-and-mortar office in reach of everyone in the country.

I know some people are afraid of the feds having a centralized and accurate registry of citizens, but the alternative (that every company who takes payments must have their own separate, partial, and inaccurate registry) causes a lot of problems.

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It's definitely a problem in the US. When setting up an account with treasury.gov there's a good chance you'll have to verify your identity, and the only way to do that is to go to a bank that you do business with that has a "Medallion Guarantee." I wish we could get to the point of having government issued smart cards for verifying identity. I would be elated if my US passport also functioned as a smart card.

ID.me's trying, but it should really be a government run service and not a private corporation.

In my preferred alternate reality, Keybase was (somehow) purchased by the feds instead of Zoom and used for exactly this purpose.

If you think about it, there is a way this is done already in the real world - using Notaries. Notaries verify your ‘documents’. Not that’s they are experts at sensitive data storage, but there could be something to learn from the ‘distributed’ system of notaries.

Notaries already exist. The proof that they are not a good solution to this problem is that they're not currently being used to solve it. All the companies doing hokey things like asking people to take a picture of themselves holding their ID and so forth could just start asking them to find a notary instead. AFAIK none of them do and I'm not clear on why you're thinking they would or should.

You are right - current notary system may not be optimal for this use case. What I meant to say was that in my understanding, my main issue with 3rd parties such as OnFido etc is my lack in trusting them with my information and secondly storing that info in a central repository. If a bad entity gets access to that database, they now have very detailed information about me.

I would rather prefer a decentralized & secure way that can be accesses via an API by companies such as privacy.com etc. The distributed piece is solved by Notaries. Could we learn something from how the notary system works that can be leveraged to build out a modern distributed ID verification system.

This is what Notaries are for. Maybe we could find a way to more efficiently utilize their services instead of creating yet another federal agency to intrude on our lives?

You've misunderstood the problem we're trying to solve.

Right now, N companies have N partial records of my identity, with varying ages and accuracy levels. Company A has my name and phone number, company B has my email and name and my previous phone number, company C has a copy of my driver's license from two years ago, etc. N partially accurate versions of my identity, floating around, getting bought and sold and merged together with buggy perl scripts, forever. Notaries do nothing to solve this.

Whence comes this fear? How would the government having an accurate list of the citizenry, and storing a key for you so you can attest your identity, intrude on your life? Doesn't having to scan a copy of your ID and send it to your [bank/insurer/crypto account/hosting company/employer/etc] intrude on your life more?

Other countries do this and manage (Australia, NZ, UK, etc). Companies outsource the KYC to vendors who carry ISO27001 etc and heaps of insurance. No sane IT people would want photos of so much personally sensitive data on their own systems.

The tech to do this well is nearly here - combination of ID on Apple/google wallet + decent on-device facial recognition tech and you can hugely reduce the risk profile of KYC.

Estonia government issued electronic IDs have a computer chip that can digitally sign data.

or... the feds stop requiring everyone to go through this KYC bullshit and we accept that anonymity or pseudonymity is hecking valid.

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