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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

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helsinkiandrew

The "Why did my account get banned after verification?" section gives some reasons:

- Repeated violations of our Usage Policy

- Account creation from an unsupported location

- Terms of Service violations

- Under-18 usage

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Those are reasons for banning after verification, not reasons for requesting identity verification in the first place.

They request ID for bans so that they can ban you personally. ID checks may as well be a sign that you've already been banned and they're fishing for ways to make the ban harder to evade. Venmo does the same thing.

Maybe Anthropic just likes creating a market for dark identities. Because that's the most likely effect of such stupidity; generating more ID theft victims with no change to services to criminals.

Is a "dark identity" one that's never been shared with an identity-theft-as-a-service? Or is it just of one that's (supposed to be) privacy-conscious (and wouldn't otherwise have been an easy victim)?

> ID checks may as well be a sign that you've already been banned and they're fishing for ways to make the ban harder to evade.

So identity verification is basically a canary that your account is about to get banned, or is on the chopping block. At that point you're better off abandoning ship rather than handing over your ID.

Basically exactly my point. If you could use the service without ID verification, and others can still use the service without ID verification, but you've been blocked because you haven't handed over your ID, then leave or start a new account. That is if you're averse to being banned personally. If you don't mind the risk then you can verify ID and prepare to jump ship if it's a ban.

Wouldn't the reasons for requesting identification be the same those for banning people - the system has flagged that you might be from the wrong location/under 18/creating multiple free acounts etc - so is validating.

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