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Comment by BenFranklin100 | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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