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Comment by joxdosba | Hacker News Reader

These links claim that identities are stolen, but do not explain how.

What happens to the victims, who are now presumably left unidentifiable? How are they tracked if they can’t be identified? Do their families recognise them? How does that work if they were married, had children or something? Does the identity thief just take over their whole life?

As far as I know, “identity theft” is a boogeyman invented by the banks. Traditionally, when someone would go to a bank and get a loan by pretending to be another person, we just called it “fraud”.

The banks realised that it would be nice to get you to feel some responsibility when they get defrauded, so after a bunch of focus grouping they came up with this new term to imply that you are somehow also a victim when the bank gets defrauded by someone else.

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I would maybe reframe it as fraud being a natural downstream effect of identity theft. I don't need to steal anyone's identity to forge a check but that's also categorized as fraud.

Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term.

If a contractor takes my money to install a pool and then disappears, I don't need to reset my entire financial identity. I think it's worth having a separate idea to describe the situation as a whole and not just the specific vector in which a crime might have been committed.

> Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term

Okay, but in the US (for example) you simply can’t do that, and your details are already available to everyone for a dollar or two.

I’ll concede that “identity theft” could conceivably have a reasonable meaning in the context of e.g. Estonian digital identities where you could in a sense steal someone’s private key.

> I’ll concede that “identity theft” could conceivably have a reasonable meaning in the context of e.g. Estonian digital identities where you could in a sense steal someone’s private key.

Stealing someone's private key still wouldn't be "identity theft", they'd just need to bootstrap a new key the same way they got the government to trust the previous one (and revoke the old one).

It's just victim-blaming and PR attempting to make companies not liable for their bad decisions.

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