President Biden Issues Executive Order to Protect Americans' Data | Hacker News Reader

President Biden Issues Executive Order to Protect Americans' Data

whitehouse.gov

38 pointscannibalXxx38 comments

How about shutting down ID.me? People are forced to sign up to this private company in order to access many public federal and state services, including unemployment and to log into Health and Human Services PMS. Signup involves photos of two government IDs, SSN, private email, cell phone number, a biometric facial recognition scan, and a live, recorded interview. Once you’re signed up, the website has ads trying to sell you shit too. I’m not kidding.

It’s really an outrageous privacy invasion and a fat target for hackers.

https://nordvpn.com/blog/is-id-me-safe/

We ought to be able to use the local post office for this kind of thing. It takes balls to lie to the feds in person and it's something that isn't feasible for a threat actor to scale.

ID.me use by government agencies such as the IRS is an outrage. Login.gov (https://login.gov/) is the obvious choice. Enough excuses. To use ID.me one must:

* Agree to binding arbitration and a class action waiver of rights.

* Consent to the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information to third parties (i.e. data brokers).

* Agree to limits on liability for any indirect, punitive, special, exemplary, incidental, or consequential damages.

* Consent to arbitrary termination of the account at any time for any reason.

For reasons that make no obvious sense, HHS/NIH replaced login.gov with ID.me last month.

had to deal wit this the other day too pay off a tax bill.

first of all, I was blocked for everythign until I vpned into the united states. then I couldn't use the verification flow until I also setup the vpn on my phone. after that I had to do a whole damn song and dance.

all so I could pay the IRS a bunch of money....

I felt violated on so many levels :P

Right? And for many people it’s not like there is any realistic choice. It’s government sanctioned extortion.

How are you being extorted?

A person’s privacy is being extorted. In order to collect something the person is rightfully due, the government essentially sticks a gun in their face and demands first they hand over biometrics and a host of other personal information.

You can ALWAYS correspond with the IRS via USPS [domestic mail service].

Since this is what they essentially force me to do, I use snail mail.

I assumed you were joking.

Whatever happened to leading the free world?

I'm actually kinda shocked people are shocked. This is literally capitalism — and I don't mean the vague boogyman driving greed and enshittification. The idea that government should externalize as much of itself to private companies that are affected by market forces is central to capitalist theory. If you truly believe in our glorious capitalist system this should be great because private companies will meet people's needs better than centrally planned inefficient government.

Our glorious efficient Clear, their slow inefficient TSA Pre Check.

This is like the worst of both, and has nothing to do with capitalism. This is pissing off both sides and pointing the finger at the other. How convenient.

So ask yourself who stands to benefit from it in the long run.

I'm not really pointing the finger at anyone. Capitalism is both a political and economic system that needs government to exist and, among other things, enforce property rights and create the conditions for a free market. And capitalist theory has to resolve the problem of governments needing to do things but with the fundamental belief that if they do them themselves it will produce worse outcomes than if private enterprise did them.

So a capitalist government says, "Okay since I know what I need done I will go out into the market and contract someone." This is the RFP process, bidding for government contracts, and public-private partnerships. Obviously individual instances will work out better or worse but if you trust the process you should want the government to outsource the work.

Capitalism is not a political system, it’s an economic system. Socialism is both a political and economic system. The terms are important. Here’s a summary:

https://www.thoughtco.com/socialism-vs-capitalism-4768969

The US is a mixture of capitalist and socialist system with distinguishing Liberal attributes.

I'll be the person. This is capitalism. It's exactly capitalism's whole shtick. It's a plague.

The USSR did the same thing, but worse. There was one (or at most 3) vendors for not just government stuff, for for everything. Even cars, and household goods. For market efficiency of course.

And the vendor got picked by some government official somewhere, so it was almost always their friends. No worries about having to pick the low bid!

That’s why the waitlist was decades for almost anything anyone actually wanted.

Capitalism is defined as an economic system in which private individuals or businesses own capital goods and operate within in a free market system, not ‘some guy greased the palm of a government official so their business now gets to hoover up people’s personal data.’ Both capitalism and socialism have corruption, moreso in socialist systems.

The correct response to ID.me is to support US Senators who are trying to get rid of ID.me.

I'm as much of a fanboy of capitalism as you can get. BUT, if you can show me a system that works fairly and well with fallible and evil humans that's better, I'm 100% onboard and will go to bat for it.

We just don't have anything like that, and I've lost all hope in humanity. So for now, plain old freedom of association and trade (i.e. capitalism) is what I'll promote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID.me

"In the wake of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic"

There it is

How is that especially relevant? ID.me is just another example in the near endless list of 'public-private partnerships' that have been eroding the public's trust for decades. It certainly didn't start during COVID.

> It certainly didn't start during COVID

No, but during the pandemic there were a ridiculous number of dubious acquisitions and somewhat-inexplicable business deals that really need to be investigated.

Covid was a lot like 911, it was used to justify a bunch of stuff they wanted to do but couldn't get away with before.

How about an order preventing it from being transferred to the US government? Or to commercial actors.

I’m not sure how somehow it’s dangerous to transfer data to China is bad, but transferring it to a random data broker who resells to anyone (including China) is ok.

Of course using data to jail and execute people is way worse than to manipulate them for profit, but I hope this is a step in the right direction.

Privacy protections coming from the Executive and Judiciary are effectively renegotiated every time we elect a new president. If people want real, meaningful privacy protection, they're going to have to motivate their House and Senate reps to make it a priority or replace them with ones who will.

Anyone trying to tell me an 'Executive Order' is a sign of good things has an uphill battle.

The executive order has become an obvious symptom of how broken the U.S. legislative process currently is.

This assumes that the style of government and players within it supports this capability in the first place (in fact, vs in theory), and I don't see a lot of good reason to believe that.

My intuition reading this announcement is that it's a setup to take another run at TikTok...and you can hardly blame them, it is a serious player on the persuasion front.

"Companies are collecting more of Americans’ data than ever before, and it is often legally sold and resold through data brokers. Commercial data brokers and other companies can sell this data to countries of concern,"

The first part is the problem, not the second part. The US needs to enshrine privacy as a basic right - it is unfortunately not listed in your Constitution. Failing that, you need a GDPR. An executive order makes for great publicity, but is pretty much useless in this case.

> The US needs to enshrine privacy as a basic right - it is unfortunately not listed in your Constitution.

One could make an argument that the Fourth Amendment applied to the modern age would enshrine privacy as a basic right online. I think there are several court cases that might even highlight this. The problem is the Fourth Amendment (and most of the Constitution in general) only explicitly outlines rights when it comes to what the government can and cannot pertaining to citizens, not what private businesses/corporations/other citizens can do.

The irony is that all of the 3-letter agencies also buy this data from said brokers.

Oh, I foolishly thought this might mean actually protecting data, not just "you can invade everyone's privacy as long as you don't [directly] sell it to china"

> to protect Americans’ sensitive personal data from exploitation by countries of concern

When does America classify itself as a country of concern? I'd personally much rather have my data exfiltrated to China where it can't be used against me as easily.

So the Biden administration's stance is what exactly? That data brokers are fine and cool, until the point of exfiltrating the data to 'a country of concern'. Shame.

There really needs to be a chain of custody for any data these companies have. And at any point, a person should be able to follow it back and see exactly where it was collected, and have it removed from every entity along the way. And if there's a break in the chain, the company should be dissolved and its entire leadership sent to prison.

This sort of chain of custody thing you're referring to is also known as Data Lineage and it's a highly difficult problem that many large institutions are interested in solving. I've talked to a number of them. Only a very few have managed to achieve good lineage even within their own organization, not to mention across companies.

An executive order can't address the things you are worried about. It was crafted to leverage lawful executive power...obviously.

[dupe]

More discussion a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540371

The word protect here makes no sense: Order to Monopolize American data. We only want the companies paying american taxes to track, spy on, sell, and abuse peoples private data against them.

The European Commission did the reverse.

Let's pray from Schrems3.

nonsense.

"Biden goes to court to renew warrantless surveillance law" https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/29/fisa_section_702_wyde...

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