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Ask HN: How do you handle organization verification?
Facebook, Twitter etc. have verified accounts. If you were adding this to your own application, how would you do it?
I imagine no matter how it's done, it will involve some amount of manual approval. I would be pleasantly surprised to learn that this can be automated.
- LinuxBender 5y agoI don't have a technical answer, but I would probably find out how online tobacco/vape companies verify people and implement that. They ask for taxpayer ID, credit card info, some other bits. It is fully automated and real-time verification.
- mjhouse 5y agoMaybe something like the following would work: * The account creator provides a photo id and an EIN * You verify that the id is valid (visual/ML inspection?) * Extract the expiration date and make sure it's unexpired (OpenCV/Tesseract) * Extract the name from the id image (OpenCV/Tesseract) * Check to see if that id matches the registered agent for that EIN. This assumes that there is a unified API for EIN/TIN lookup in the US and I don't know if there is.
- warrenm 5y agoI'm not sure on the details of how it's done ... but it certainly is done :) Honestly, the library/libraries used are kinda moot - those things change all the time (ie, it doesn't matter if it's OpenCV or something else) Most government-issued IDs are intentionally designed to be very hard to OCR (it's why they have barcodes/etc on them for automated scanning) - and any advances in image processing are more-or-less immediately countered by improvements in ID construction I know the E-Verify (https://e-verify.gov https://e-verify.gov) service that come businesses use to process I-9 forms (https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9-paper-version.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...) electronically manages to link SSN, IDs, and other factors to ensure the person filling-out the form matches (as close as can be determined) the data they're filling-in
- mjhouse 5y agoThat's a good point about the OCR obfuscation. I'll try to find some more info about E-Verify- thanks man.
- warrenm 5y agoAs LinuxBender wrote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274924), there are ways to do this Credit card, SSN/tax ID, scans of Passport/ID card - some of this is done by online-only financial services (eg Petalcard) There's also tools like DocuSign, multifactor authentication mechanisms (SMS + TOTP app + email, etc) If the service/tool is only "supposed" to verify certain types of accounts, you might require the use of specific format email addresses, too (has to end .gov, .edu, nytimes.comm etc) - this can lend itself to organizational verification (gonna be harder to spoof (and therefore easier to verify) harvard.edu than blurblebuck.me)