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   Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:07 JST Waldo Jaquith

   I thought that online identity verification services were as inequitable as they could possibly be, but I've gotta hand it to them, they've done it—they've somehow found a way to bake in an entirely new cultural bias. Not familiar with Western astrology? You won't be getting the government service that you needed!

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     Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:03 JST Waldo Jaquith

     in reply to

     That will restore the normal order of things in the U.S., where you show a state ID to a local, state, or federal agency to prove your identity. Private vendors—especially credit agencies—are going to fight this tooth and nail, insisting that mDLs are some kind of a horrible encroachment on your privacy, and that the best thing would be for them to get billions of dollars in government contracts to mine your financial records and then quiz you on them to prove your identity.

     HistoPol (#HP) 🥥 🌴 repeated this.
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     Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:03 JST Waldo Jaquith

     in reply to

     You know how we've reached the point where half of congress says that it's totally inappropriate for people to be able to file their taxes online directly with the IRS? That the Good and Right thing is to have to pay H&R Block or Intuit?

     That's the play that private identity vendors are making. They’re racing for the perception of incumbency before states can catch up with mDLs, before Login.gov can work with those states to ensure that anybody with a DMV record can access government services.

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     Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:05 JST Waldo Jaquith

     in reply to

     I forecast a huge freakout about mobile drivers licenses (mDLs), ginned up by industry.

     Here's why: At the moment, a dozen private vendors are successfully inserting themselves into the online equivalent of a mundane, decades-old interaction: a member of the public showing their state-issued ID to a government employee. This interaction used to cost literally nothing. Now big contracts go to vendors to do this, because there *is* no online equivalent of a state-issued ID.

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     Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:05 JST Waldo Jaquith

     in reply to

     The American Association of Motor Vehicles (a coalition of every state DMV) created the mobile driver’s license standard. Right now it's goofy—a way to store your license on your phone to show in person instead of a card. Which nobody asked for. But they're working toward something vastly more useful: a way to store your license on your phone and present it to a remote party. Kind of like signing into a website with your Google credentials, but instead your DMV credentials.

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     Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:06 JST Waldo Jaquith

     in reply to

     In August 2021 I wrote an article on this topic for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s publication, Community Development Innovation Review, in an issue dedicated to fintech, racial equity, and an inclusive financial system, for anybody who wants to learn more about the inequities baked into the paradigm of online identity verification that exploded into public use in 2020. https://www.frbsf.org/community-development/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/jaquith-americans-need-a-digital-identity-system-stat.pdf

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     Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 21:31:06 JST Waldo Jaquith

     in reply to

     Something that I've worked on a bunch professionally, but never written about here: online identity verification is really important for access to government services, access to which is increasingly intermediated via the internet. The current approach to verifying identities generally relies on verification of information in credit records, which is bad and foolish for lots of reasons. The proper solution is the remote presentation of mobile driver's licenses. That's ~3 years off, I regret.