Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I heard that in France, they'd use postal office workers to verify people's IDs. It's a brilliant alternative to whatever we're doing in Germany.

View on HN

We couldn't possibly employ people to solve the problem. Don't you know the post office is a waste of money?

Isn’t that just like Postident in Germany?

Not at all. Postident required going to the post office in person with your ID, and famously omitted a lot of foreign IDs and required an Anmeldung.

What are we doing in Germany?

The options I have seen so far were a) using our digital IDs, which is very handy or b) having a bank verify my identity in person with my ID, which is also pretty good.

These options are not available to recent immigrants, people with foreign documents and people without a registered address. I spent a lot of time working around those limitations.

What is the difference between the second option and how they do it in France? I haven't tried it before, but shouldn't that work with foreign documents or without a registered address as well? Or is it more like that it should work in theory, but in practice those documents just aren't accepted?

Correction: I meant postal delivery workers. You don't have to leave your house.

That would require training a lot more people to pay very close attention to these matters and intimately know tons of different identity documents... doesn't sound very trustworthy.

Don't we have PostIdent in Germany? At least I used it to open my bank account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com