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Instagram Asking For Your Government Issued Photo IDs Now, Too
- rglover 14y agoI hate to play the paranoia card, but this reads like a push from the government for Facebook to start cataloging people. If it wasn't happening already, this is probably the missing piece in court evidence to show that a person is who they really are. This is really, really dangerous (especially when the majority of their users probably aren't bright enough to understand the implications).
- mistercow 14y agoSince they tell you to cover up your license number, it's hard to see how it would be particularly helpful for cataloging.
- rglover 14y agoI'm thinking of a visual catalog. Where if I commit a crime and Facebook can be used as evidence, if one of my photos is my license, it guarantees that it's me. Maybe catalog isn't the right word, but some means for quickly matching a profile to an individual.
- FourthProtocol 14y agoIt doesn't. Ebay asked me for a scan of my passport a while ago. I changed all of the details, including my name, and they accepted it.
- rglover 14y agoInteresting. Do you mind me asking why they required a passport? Seems a bit off.
- FourthProtocol 14y agoThey asked because I hadn't logged in for two years. I only use Ebay when I have no alternative.
- phillmv 14y agoYou mean, they needed something other than your birth date, birth place, real name, current residence, work history, current job, name of your parents, cousins, grandparents, not to mention the rest of your graph, to correlate you to a database somewhere?
- rglover 14y agoYep. Technically I could lie about all of that, but a gov issued ID is 100% factual and has my photo. Also, this suggests requiring a birth certificate in some situations which is even more extreme.
- ahoyhere 14y agoThe only thing FB has from me that is real or accurate is my birthday. All the other things you listed are either totally false or out of date. (Then again, I don't "friend" my family… IRL or online.) Until now-ish (or the near future), FB had no way of verifying that, or forcing me to!
- pasbesoin 14y agoHow do you connect? If you aren't actively and intelligently taking precautions, they may well have enough network address history to be fairly definitive. Also, do you block their widgets on other sites/pages? Not that I disagree with the "Big Brother" concerns that this "Ihre Papiere, bitte." activity raises. P.S. Aside from government(s), of what value is a proven identity to commercial interests? Being able to prove that you/they are targeting exactly who they want. Hmm... Amongst other things, I understand that process servers are already attemtping to use FB as a accepted means of delivery. And I've read that debt collectors are using accounts having profile pictures of bikini clad young women, in order to successfully "friend" those they wish to hound. All sorts of value to "proven" identities...
- tsieling 14y agoThe government has that information. This is an attack by Facebook on the idea that you control your identity, or that you can have identity outside the confines of a private company over which you have no power.
- znowi 14y agoWell, Facebook is a catalog of people. Most of them use real identities. 15% of the world's population willingly share their lives online with full tracking available. It's a dream come true to any secret agency. Push for real identities is beneficial to both - government and social networks. First get more control over their citizens, second more ad revenue.
- unimpressive 14y agoI like to imagine Mark Zuckerburg sits in his five star hotel strumming "career of evil" while he practices his smile in the mirror. At some point you have to start attributing actions to malice.
- danso 14y agoThe OP says Facebok asserts that I is requiring his documentation of certain users with a high number of subscribers...but it seems possible that they'll turn this on any one who has been flagged for having a non real name, or when there are similar accounts (I.e. nearly all the same friends, except one is the person's "fake" account) on the same computer
- darrikmazey 14y agoWhat concerns me is that I doubt the average user will understand the potential ramifications of entrusting a copy of their ID to a third party. If these documents are not well-protected or the user does not bother to or is not capable of covering up information that can be used for the purposes of identity theft, this could be catastrophic for some users.
- 001sky 14y agoinformation that can be used for the purposes of identity theft Agree. Scanning a drivers license over the internet seems ...
- MJR 14y ago"Clearly show your name, picture, birthday" "Cover up any personal information we don't need to verify your identity (ex: address, license number)" Most Facebook users have already given their name, birthday and profile photo. For most users they wouldn't be giving anything else than those pieces of information on a ID card. Now, that doesn't get into the secondary requests as the article states, but it certainly isn't "entrusting a copy of their ID to a third party."
- MichaelGG 14y agoUsers will not cover up their documents properly. With business customers, even if we ask for ID to confirm larger contracts, they'll send everything. Full IDs, credit card scans, etc. Technical customers regularly just email root passwords to financially-valuable systems when they have the slightest problem. Also, try this: run an ad on Craigslist offering $500 a day for whatever. Ask for personal info and photos. You'll be deluged with people ready to hand every detail over without second thought.
- mikecane 14y agoAh, I can already smell the class action lawsuit for massive ID theft down the road.
- nwh 14y agoGot to wonder how long it will be until a Facebook account is a form of valid ID in itself.
- PedroCandeias 14y agoThis notion has been floating around for a while now and it seems less and less unlikely. I for one am not willing to accept a company taking charge of my ID. Actually, the day facebook asks me for my ID will be the day I quit it. It's total abuse.
- nwh 14y agoA database that spans 1/7th of the worlds population. Facial recognition, relationships and locations. It really is the dream as far as fully validating an identity goes.
- beagle3 14y ago> It really is the dream as far as fully validating an identity goes. It really is a dream as far as intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA and their less public counterparts) go. It used to be ridiculously hard to find the info about how to reach a person, or which buttons to push. Now, almost everyone offers it freely about themselves, and the few who don't get ratted on by their friends. Validating identity might be a by product. But it's not anything that's hard to do anyway.
- driverdan 14y agoThere are a number of startups working on products in this space, such as use of social media accounts as verification to screen for and prevent fraud.
- MJR 14y agoIt can't. That's the whole reason they're having this problem in the first place. They don't do anything in an official capacity to verify that you are who you say you are. They're relying here on Gov't agencies that require more proof with official documents before giving you another official document(ID card) to certify that you are who you say you are. It can never be a valid ID, because they are never involved in the certification and registration process of your "official" existence.
- nakedrobot2 14y agoThe instagram TOS debacle some weeks ago was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I recently stopped using Instagram, and requested account deletion from Facebook. Graph search and its creepy implications were then nothing I needed to find personally objectionable anymore. I no longer have to complain about the other sleazy, move-the-goalposts, amoral aspects of Facebook Instagram. This latest one, I have to say, should not be surprising to anybody. DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't like it. You will still have friends, I promise :-) Before you file for account deletion, you might want to do two things: 1) use http://www.picknzip.com/ http://www.picknzip.com/ to download the pictures of you from other people (I have a couple that I liked that I can use for other profile pics, etc.). (The other photos in my facebook albums that I uploaded myself, I already have elsewhere.) 2) associate your facebook account with a yahoo email address. You can download all the contact information of your facebook friends that way (I don't know if this still works, but it did last year) This is, AFAIK, the only way to export your facebook friends' data 3) go to your full friends list, scroll down until the infinite scrolling loads the whole list. copy and paste this in an email to yourself. These three steps should ensure that you don't "lose" any data about your friends on facebook, and will allow you to email them later.
- largesse 14y agoI have friends who work at Facebook. I still don't know how they rationalize their employment.
- taftster 14y agoUndoubtedly their rationalization is in the form of USD.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoI don't know about them, but I know someone from a different company who has it all figured out. Every time their company does something nasty, they just donate to the EFF. Must be nice to have it wrapped up all tidy like.
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- Nux 14y agoLOL! This is surreal.
- hnriot 14y agoPeople easily forget that Facebook was funded by the CIA and remains their biggest success in intelligence gathering.
- nwh 14y ago[citation needed]
- larrykubin 14y agoI think this is a reference to a story on The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/ http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
- visualcsharp 14y agoMore likely they never knew to begin with. Stupid public.
- akadien 14y agoI don't see Facebook on either list. http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ict.html http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ict.html http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/alumni.html http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/alumni.html
- Joe_Knapp 14y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGdWsxHJlM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGdWsxHJlM
- Evbn 14y agoHN, I will be disappointed if by this time tomorrow I don't see "Show HN: government id image generator (no numbers, so it can't be used as an fraudulent ID)" For FB's, they have to excuse from making an open source client side pre-upload number-removing tool.
- jivatmanx 14y agoTerrible idea, you'll likely be a felon for distribution of fraudulent federal Identification. Same for anyone who uses it.
- unimpressive 14y agoThis. Plus, if the service your using wants your ID, theres no point trying to trick it. Supporting them is like drinking poison then stomach pumping a few ounces of it and leaving the rest.
- harshreality 14y agoIf you're generating them with blacked-out DL number and address, that's not really a fake identification card, is it? Not to mention you'd be generating an image, not an actual ID. Creating real-looking ID cards is much more difficult than creating real-looking ID card scans. The most difficult elements would probably be faking the font, and post-processing it to ensure the text looked real (pixel-perfect accuracy and color for text would be a dead giveaway of computer generation).
- DanBC 14y ago> If you're [...] that's not really a fake identification card I'm not a lawyer, nor a law enforcement officer, nor a prosecutor, nor a judge. While agree that something to allow you to use a website shouldn't be a serious criminal offence it's easy to imagine that it could be painted as such: unauthorised access to website services after a clear warning; fake id instruments; etc etc etc.
- rhizome 14y agoAre you saying that an image that is similar to a federal ID but with the numbers removed could be mistaken for a legitimate ID?
- zenocon 14y agoI don't think this is new. I abandoned FB about 2 years ago, and maybe a year ago I re-established my account just to setup a developer key using OAuth2 for an app I was building. I also got locked out of my FB account at that time, and it prompted me to scan my driver's license and upload it -- at which point I promptly said F U and scratched Facebook OAuth support off my list of features.
- purephase 14y agoI had the same experience. I signed-up, then turned up all of the privacy settings just so I could use it to test oauth, then FB disabled my account. I guess it's suspect when you turn off all of the account features. I tried to explain what I was using the account for to their account reps, but they wouldn't unlock it unless I sent them the ID scans. I can't believe that there is not a bigger uproar about a non-governmental, for-profit asking for government issued ID, in electronic format no less, that relies on the unwitting user to hide pertinent data prior to scanning it. Fucking ridiculous if you ask me. Instagram should be equally ashamed of themselves.
- RexRollman 14y agoJust when you think FB can't be any creepier.
- ForFreedom 14y agoIf social networks are so adamant, I will just create my website have all relatives and friends contact me via the said website. Or may be by email before social networks actually caught up.
- technoslut 14y agoThis is the way it should be done. I will say that social networks like Facebook have introduced some interesting dynamics and engagement that could have not existed otherwise such as Caine's Arcade. I think we're all waiting for the social network we all want and pay the $10-$12/year for privacy, transparency and complete ownership over our data.
- amirmc 14y agoThe problem will be getting everyone onto that network. Although I now understand (and value) privacy and data ownership, there was a time when I'd refuse to pay for anything if there was a free alternative. I'm currently working on distributed systems/networks which could form the basis of a 'social graph' but there are questions about how to make it profitable (hence self-sustaining). Getting people onto a network is only part of the problem.
- speik 14y agoIsn't that what App.net is supposed to be? Or are there problems with it I can't identify (being too poor to deem $5 a month on a social network a valid expense).
- mehulkar 14y agoThe only problem is the Facebook already has a billion users.
- nwh 14y agoFor me, $5 is a lot of lentils. The main issue is that the cost barrier stops people from signing up just to try it out, in in that sense that app.net really ought to have a 'free' tier. Even if it was particularly restive, it would let their users get a feel for it before paying.
- abecedarius 14y agoTaking their words at face value, what does someone's identity have to do with whether they've violated terms of service? How would it fix any issue? (On Instagram; according to the article Facebook wants your true name as part of their TOS.)
- nonamegiven 14y agoIt fixes the issue that you still aren't as valuable to advertisers as facebook and instagram would like you to be. Follow the money. Always.
- yarou 14y agoSoon they'll ask for a blood sample, and perhaps your genome. It's laughable how privacy is not taken seriously anymore.
- icebraining 14y agoAnymore? When was it ever?
- chimeracoder 14y agoWell, it's not Facebook who's doing the asking, but Facebook's closer than you might think to having genetic information: https://www.facebook.com/23andMe https://www.facebook.com/23andMe
- Oculus 14y agoWhy on earth would they do something like this? The people at FB aren't insane, there must be some sort of reasoning for their decision to ask for ID
- artursapek 14y agoI wonder just how much friction Facebook users are going to put up with until we start seeing news of record account deletions. I doubt any Facebook executive wanted to do this. This is a decision made by lawyers. This is Facebook getting to big for its own good. People, get off Facebook. I'm in college and haven't touched it in 11 months. I'm doing just fine. Nobody needs it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sadlyNess 14y agoFB & G+ are pushing so much to have data on their users actual identities, I wonder what they want to do with that database. Considering the move polarises some users.
- Snoptic 14y agoYou wonder? They tell you every day. They want to show you ads and grow their network.
- darrikmazey 14y agoI wonder how this correlating data can be used in cases of copyright infringement where the alleged infringer is only identified by IP address. Could a correlation between IP address and real-world identification be made by subpoena of FB records? Reference: http://torrentfreak.com/court-throws-out-109-of-110-alleged-bittorrent-pirates-then-kicks-out-110th-too-130125/ http://torrentfreak.com/court-throws-out-109-of-110-alleged-...
- lignuist 14y agoI never had a facebook account and they make it harder and harder for me to get one.
- jusben1369 14y agoDid anyone read the purported FB message? "drivers liscense" I trust FB to spell correctly and use the right apostrophe. Very interesting set of responses here though.
- cabalamat 14y agoAnother site which I will nevcer be a member of.
- Tekker 14y agoA hundred bucks this is tied in with photo-tagging and facial recognition. The advantage of a government photo is that you're no longer allowed to smile and are expected to provide a neutral face, all the better for facial recognition. I wouldn't touch Facebook with a ten-foot pole right now.
- Snoptic 14y agoSeriously? Fire up picasa or iphoto or Facebook and then tell me whether facial expression is any part of facial recognition all. Recognition works because it uses immovable bone structure.
- walshemj 14y agoWhat next if you don't do this are they going to send round her flick and von smallhausen. I am tempted to join instagram just so i can upload a picture of ian lavender - "Don't tel Him Pike"
- naner 14y agoNow that it is (ostensibly) appropriate for web sites to ask for photo IDs, that opens up new opportunities for phishing and identity theft.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoIf this is an official Facebook thing then the screen cap in the article where driver's license is spelled "Driver's liscense" doesn't do them a lot of favors. In particular one of the first hints that something is a phish is that the grammar or spelling is phonetic but incorrect.
- cschmidt 14y agoI wonder exactly what violations they're dealing with. My son's junior high is full of kids using Instagram. They see it as an underage Facebook. That could be it. Or is there some wave of people using an assumed name.
- Snoptic 14y agoWow, does instagram illegally solicit and publish personal data from preteens?
- cschmidt 14y agoJust to be clear, when I said: > They see it as an underage Facebook. I meant the underage kids, not Facebook itself. I wouldn't say Instagram solicits kids, just that there are lot of them on there.
- mikeyk 14y agoHey all, Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder) here. Just wanted to offer some clarification since there's some speculation about the reason & scope for the verification mentioned in the article. When we receive evidence of a violation of our site policies, we respond. This isn't a recent change, but the way we've run our community from the beginning. In some specific cases, for verification purposes, we request that people upload a government issued ID in response. This is the case for a very small percentage of accounts, and doesn't affect most Instagram users. The ID is used only for account verification, and not retained permanently. Hope that helps clarify things a bit.
- kevinSuttle 14y agoOne more reason to gladly pay Flickr. Sayonara Instamine.
- GuiA 14y ago>The ID is used only for account verification, and not retained permanently. Do you ask to cover the license number/address as well, the way Facebook.com does? If yes, doesn't it make it trivially easy to send a fake picture of a license your way?
- joering2 14y ago> and not retained permanently Mike, how can you be a "software engineer" and make a statement like that?
- capnrefsmmat 14y ago> In some specific cases, for verification purposes, we request that people upload a government issued ID in response. Verification of what?
- znowi 14y ago> Hope that helps clarify things a bit. Yes, it helps. Now I'm even more convinced how corrupt your company is.
- VeejayRampay 14y agoIt DOES clarify things. Maybe not the way you'd like though.
- timrpeterson 14y agowow, fb and instagram just seem hell-bent on getting rid of users
- shiven 14y agoWhy add any of your data to FB? Why not just use it like an idiot box where you never create content but only consume it? I rarely, if ever, upload/update anything on FB, using it only to view updates/uploads from FB friends. No likes, comments, replies, tags. If I see anything worth replying or writing in response to what someone posts on FB, I prefer to use side-channels like email/texting or the phone. Has worked great for the last 5 years. Clearly, mine may be a single data point/unique case :-)
- timrpeterson 14y agoAnd they misspelled "license"? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/images/facebook-confirm-ID-s.jpg http://talkingpointsmemo.com/images/facebook-confirm-ID-s.jp...
- Happymrdave 14y agoOn one hand, this is excessive. Really excessive. On the other, at least it's still a reset option. That might sound silly at first, but I lost access to an old MS Live account that I had foolishly left on auto-login on my Xbox for years and eventually lost access to the old Hotmail account (yeah, I made this account a long time ago) it was tied to. No amount of offering to show that I was the credit card holder for the hundreds of dollars in games or anything would convince them it was my account. For the people to whom their Instagram account is really important, this might be a nice option (even if it is rather invasive).