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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

In that case why specifically say "driver's license"? And when she complained that she did not have one surely it would have been easy for the person on the phone to correct her and state that any valid ID would be fine rather than insist on a driver's license, I'm sure it's not the first time this has come up.

In the UK people will usually say "Passport or Drivers License" (or if your in a bar just 'ID?') since almost everybody will have at least one of the two.

Pherhaps this is because less people in the US have a passport?

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> In that case why specifically say "driver's license"?

Because more people are confused by government ID thinking it means passport, military ID or something like that, than are confused by thinking Drivers License means only a drivers license and nothing else. They may also try to offer items that don't count, such as a photo-ID health card.

My point here was more that once she mentioned that she did not have a drivers license , I would have assumed a good customer service person might suggest some specific alternatives at that point to avoid confusion. I'm assuming a passport or military ID would have been adequate.

It just seems to me surprising to declare someone as stupid for assuming that 'drivers license' literaly meant 'drivers license' as opposed to 'drivers license or equivilent' especially when the customer service person did not help them understand, lots of people end up with various forms of ID from passports to membership cards, it doesn't seem that surprising that someone might not know exactly which forms are equivilent by memory.

Reminds me of confusion in the early 90s with some software requirements specifying "IBM PC" when really meaning "IBM Compatible PC".

> I'm assuming a passport or military ID would have been adequate.

I really can't emphasize enough the degree to which the US revolves around state-issued photo IDs, whether in the form of a driver's license or a simple ID card. This assumption is baked into everything.

Take a look at this page: http://www.travel.state.gov/passport/ppi/stats/stats_890.htm...

In 2000, there were fewer than 50 million valid US passports. That's less than 18% of the population at the time, and a chunk of those passports were probably not truly valid -- US passports are good for 10 years, and nobody bothers to tell the State Department when somebody dies.

10 years earlier, in 1990, there were only about 11 million passports, less than 4% of the US population at the time.

This is because nobody needed one. Few Americans leave the US to go anywhere other than Canada or Mexico. Until 2009, land-based travel to Canada and Mexico did not require a passport, and until 2007, air travel to Canada and Mexico didn't, either.

This isn't Europe, you can't drive across multiple international borders on a day trip. It's possible to traverse over 4,400km in a straight line (on land) without leaving the 48 contiguous US states, and over 6,600km in a straight line (on land) going from northwestern Canada to southern Mexico, with only the US in between.

In contrast, by the time it became common for Americans to need an ID card at all, drivers licenses were also becoming common. Win-win.

We do say this in the UK, but .......

its really rare to be asked for ID, it happens but only on the really big stuff (loans, getting a car, buying a _house_).

You would not need to provide a driving license to buy an iPhone.

I have just moved to the US for work and I am amazed at how often you guys get asked for driving license / SSN etc.

We're the country that invented the TSA. You shouldn't be surprised we have a long tradition of security theater. :)

(Edit: I'm rather displeased that the comment I'm replying to here is getting downvoted. It's in no way deserved. He asked a reasonable question as a European to whom this aspect of American culture is, not surprisingly, alien.)

It's an embedded cultural assumption that gets written down for people who abdicate thought to what their computer screen literally says.

Historically, almost everybody in the US has a driver's license, and almost no one has any other meaningful form of ID. Many, if not most Americans will never leave the country, making a passport useless, and up until a few years ago, a US citizen could travel throughout much of North America and the Caribbean without one anyway.

They say it because it's what people say. Treat it as an historical quirk of American English.

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