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Comment by batuhanicoz | Hacker News Reader

Turkish Government has an API. You post all the info on the ID to it, and it returns true or false. You have to be a legal entity in Turkey to access it. (Edit: Correction, everyone can access it, and it doesn't require all the info anymore, just ID number, name and birthday. https://tckimlik.nvi.gov.tr/Service/KPSPublic.asmx?op=TCKiml...)

I'm guessing there are other countries that provides this?

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As a developer, that's awesome. As a citizen.. I would guess not so much.

In Turkey everything is accessible with API's. Legal records, insurance, education, work, bank records, things you own (houses, land, probably cars), your address (both work and home), your e-mail, phone number, every other phone number you own, you can even do a quick query on if a car has ever been in an accident or if someone has priors.

Not everything is open to everyone though. My company had access to some of this, it was nice. (Edit: nice as in, it made our life easier.)

Greece has several such open API endpoints for validating information, including VAT/company number, the equivalent of social security number, whether your personal tax returns have been processed, whether you were admitted to a state university, and so on.

For most of these services, all you need to access results is a subset of the relevant information. There is no requirement to register or authenticate, but they do seem to have crude forms of rate limiting in place.

just ID number, name and birthday.

Probably the hardest thing to get is someone's ID number, but it doesn't sound like that is a secret. If you do have those three things, you can look them up in this system and then photoshop a fake-id that will pass anything facebook can verify via that system too.

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