Comment by helsinkiandrew

2 months ago

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

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.

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    • > 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.

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  • 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.