4 ms·

Vaccine Site Uses Credit History to Verify Patients’ Identities

13 points by arkadiyt 6y ago

NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
The nuance here is that "credit history" usually means "record of ability to pay debts and manage credit". This is not that. This is about the use of the credit account metadata - e.g. what accounts do you have, when did you open them, your prior addresses - for identity verification. This does represent a problem for people who have no, or insufficient, credit history to achieve the identification bar; but this isn't about a patient's creditworthiness per se.
tedjdziuba 6y ago
> One-in-five Americans is “credit invisible”... The article makes this out to be a _bad_ thing. It's great that so many people exist outside of a database.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
A symptom of not having national ID infrastructure and falling back to credit reporting agencies for suboptimal identity proofing. The IRS also does this sort of identity proofing to prevent fraudulent return filings, as do some financial services providers and healthcare systems. Login.gov would be a great fit for this, with identification verification performed by local trust anchors (usps branches, banks, social security offices, dmvs) acting as notaries.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  Why does there seem to be no momentum to fix the identity problem at the government level? I note the RealID fiasco, which still consists of outsourcing things to 50+ driver's license authorities, has taken two full decades to get to "Okay, we're serious, this time we're actually going to require it in another year or so." Are we really completely held hostage by the Mark of The Beast crowd?
  - supertrope 6y ago
    Yes. There is a durable political coalition against national ID cards and a database. On the right Republicans don’t trust the government to not abuse the data nor to actually implement it competently. On the left Democrats are concerned about the left behind (poverty, unbanked, illegal immigrant, no broadband, no transportation or PTO) and privacy (not just from the government). So we hobble along with the status quo of state driver’s licenses, SSN, DOB, and Equifax, Experian, and Transunion. Even if there was a national ID it’s just the tip of the iceberg of many bureaucracies that look into the computers that connect to a COBOL backend.p that expects SSNs and reacts poorly to Sr/Jr or people with the same name and birthday.

13 points by arkadiyt 6y ago

The nuance here is that "credit history" usually means "record of ability to pay debts and manage credit". This is not that. This is about the use of the credit account metadata - e.g. what accounts do you have, when did you open them, your prior addresses - for identity verification. This does represent a problem for people who have no, or insufficient, credit history to achieve the identification bar; but this isn't about a patient's creditworthiness per se.

tedjdziuba 6y ago

> One-in-five Americans is “credit invisible”... The article makes this out to be a _bad_ thing. It's great that so many people exist outside of a database.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

A symptom of not having national ID infrastructure and falling back to credit reporting agencies for suboptimal identity proofing. The IRS also does this sort of identity proofing to prevent fraudulent return filings, as do some financial services providers and healthcare systems. Login.gov would be a great fit for this, with identification verification performed by local trust anchors (usps branches, banks, social security offices, dmvs) acting as notaries.

hakfoo 6y ago
Why does there seem to be no momentum to fix the identity problem at the government level? I note the RealID fiasco, which still consists of outsourcing things to 50+ driver's license authorities, has taken two full decades to get to "Okay, we're serious, this time we're actually going to require it in another year or so." Are we really completely held hostage by the Mark of The Beast crowd?
- supertrope 6y ago
  Yes. There is a durable political coalition against national ID cards and a database. On the right Republicans don’t trust the government to not abuse the data nor to actually implement it competently. On the left Democrats are concerned about the left behind (poverty, unbanked, illegal immigrant, no broadband, no transportation or PTO) and privacy (not just from the government). So we hobble along with the status quo of state driver’s licenses, SSN, DOB, and Equifax, Experian, and Transunion. Even if there was a national ID it’s just the tip of the iceberg of many bureaucracies that look into the computers that connect to a COBOL backend.p that expects SSNs and reacts poorly to Sr/Jr or people with the same name and birthday.