Comment by moffkalast
8 days ago
> made me take a photo of myself and of my passport
I'm not sure how this has become the go-to method for every site that needs person verification, and it's kinda terrifying because you just know they keep all of it stored somewhere forever with half assed security and the whole DB will get leaked sooner or later like it always is, leading to so much identity theft it's not even funny. The only camera that should ever get to see anyone's passport is the border police scanner.
And I'm sure they say they delete all of it after verification, and then probably laugh about it afterwards if anyone believes that bullshit.
I've worked on some of this stuff. It was mandated by Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) regulation on the finance industry, who developed smoother UX patterns and white-label vendors for doing such a thing, which helped normalize and simplify the process for other data-greedy sectors to adopt. Yes, marketing tried to pretty-please their way into data that should only have been for verification. To my knowledge they didn't succeed. On that attempt. At that company.
That most financial regulations targeting bad actors end up constraining or disempowering regular people is a feature, not a bug. This is a really good thread: There is no freedom without the freedom to transact.
https://nitter.net/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083#m
Sort of reminds me of hollywood. They used their power to push music/movie drm. This then was pushed into the computer industry (to play media), and then phones and tables became locked up/normalized (to play media), and then the locks have made all this other (disempowering regular people) stuff possible.