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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

Is it weird that my reaction to all of this is that I am just going to drop these websites when they ask me for this?

I've already dropped sites/services where annoyance-invasion/usefulness ratio is above 50% but I'm afraid it will be unavoidable in some cases.

At least I know what kind of hand gesture they will get first :)

No, but what would you do if it's a government required service?

The IRS wanted a full 3d scan of my face to prove identity AFTER I already had a working account used every year for the past 3+ years.

They asked for feedback after I canceled the login, I gave very candid feedback in a form.

Then they asked if I would give an interview.

You know why I wanted to log in? To claim a $7 refund.

They ended up mailing it.

I wonder if the identity requirements are lowered if you owe them money?

Yes actually, I've seen both. It makes sense because nobody would impersonate me to give them money.

I also make sure they never owe me. Otherwise I get delayed money, ID thieves have another reason to target me, thieves might actually get it, and the IRS might not give it. And the last thing happened to me once with a large refund, for a year, because of a pure logistics error on their end that took me a ton of effort to get them to fix, and it was kinda related to ID. Identity situation is much cleaner if I just pay the IRS.

Then you sign in using your eID which is both highly secure and tied to your personal identity. Government services don't need 3rd party are-you-a-human verification, not when your account is tied to your identity.

(this is from the Netherlands where you can use digID [0] to sign into government services and ID-bound 3rd parties like insurance, mortgages, pensions etc)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiD

I thought recently there was a kerfuffle about DigiD being tied to an American data farming company

Then I would opt not to use the computer for this task, and instead call, visit, mail, or fax the government agency.

Oh I wish! Had to solve one in order to pay a bill.

The internet is dead.

That's like saying the roads are dead because people built strip malls and McDonald's everywhere. They're ugly and mostly annoying but there's still those roads leading to the paths into the mountains, ready for anyone who knows how to find them.

Not really.

I closed and walked away from a long standing account with HSBC when they introduced a requirement in their app for me to have Google Keyboard installed and active as my primary keyboard rather than my own one that I knew wouldn't send my keypresses to Google.

Sometimes all we need is the final push from them declining your business unless you jump through their hoops to agree that it's not worth your time.

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