The IRS wants to scan your face

J

Jeni

Senior Member
https://www.yahoo.com/news/irs-wants-scan-face-171738919.htm


WASHINGTON _ Millions of Americans will soon have to scan their faces to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government's biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people's everyday lives.
Taxpayers will still be able to file their returns the old-fashioned way. But by this summer, anyone wanting to access their records - including details about child tax credits, payment plans or tax transcripts - on the IRS website will be required to record a video of their face with their computer or smartphone and send it to the private contractor ID.me to confirm their identity.

About 70 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services have already been scanned by the McLean, Va.-based company, which says its client list includes 540 companies; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs.
But ID.me's $86 million contract with the IRS has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans' facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come. There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared

I think deciding the laws around privacy and how data is stored or shared is something they should do BEFORE not after in use.
 

I have to renew my Pennsylvania drivers license. It want to get a fancy ID one. But you need all kinds of "verification", Like my great-great-great grandfather's Civil War ID #. And I need a Social Security card. I lost it in 1968. I've been online for 4 hours. messing with government log ons, and that ID.me thing. Social Security has never heard of me, and is locking me out-I don't have an account. But they've been sending me a check, every month, since 2001. I can't get a paper card with my SS# on it (which I ******* KNOW), but they can send me money.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
I have to renew my Pennsylvania drivers license. It want to get a fancy ID one. But you need all kinds of "verification", Like my great-great-great grandfather's Civil War ID #. And I need a Social Security card. I lost it in 1968. I've been online for 4 hours. messing with government log ons, and that ID.me thing. Social Security has never heard of me, and is locking me out-I don't have an account. But they've been sending me a check, every month, since 2001. I can't get a paper card with my SS# on it (which I ******* KNOW), but they can send me money.
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You can go on the Social Security website and get a paper ID card. I did, because Unemployment wanted to verify my identify AFTER they had sent me payments, and it was required. You should receive it within a couple of weeks.
 
Jeni said:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/irs-wants-scan-face-171738919.htm


WASHINGTON _ Millions of Americans will soon have to scan their faces to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government's biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people's everyday lives.
Taxpayers will still be able to file their returns the old-fashioned way. But by this summer, anyone wanting to access their records - including details about child tax credits, payment plans or tax transcripts - on the IRS website will be required to record a video of their face with their computer or smartphone and send it to the private contractor ID.me to confirm their identity.

About 70 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services have already been scanned by the McLean, Va.-based company, which says its client list includes 540 companies; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs.
But ID.me's $86 million contract with the IRS has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans' facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come. There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared

I think deciding the laws around privacy and how data is stored or shared is something they should do BEFORE not after in use.
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I'm no longer concerned with it. My iPhone uses facial recognition. My Bank of America App uses facial recognition. If I travel internationally, the Passport kiosks use facial recognition.

Due to Unemployment suddenly thinking I was not qualified to earn payments for 15 months after having my job eliminated, I had to use ID.me. I was required to take a selfie, enter my Passport, enter my DL and enter my Social Security card. I had to schedule a Zoom call with one of their representatives to verify it was me. They finally verified my identity and stopped hounding me to pay back what I had received.

There is no privacy anymore. Facebook knows my preferences. Youtube knows my preferences. Amazon knows my preferences. They all send me offers based on my searches. If you are on the internet you have sacrificed your privacy.

The government is the least of my worries. I can only make sure any financial accounts are set up with two-step verification.
 
Jeni said:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/irs-wants-scan-face-171738919.htm


WASHINGTON _ Millions of Americans will soon have to scan their faces to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government's biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people's everyday lives.
Taxpayers will still be able to file their returns the old-fashioned way. But by this summer, anyone wanting to access their records - including details about child tax credits, payment plans or tax transcripts - on the IRS website will be required to record a video of their face with their computer or smartphone and send it to the private contractor ID.me to confirm their identity.

About 70 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services have already been scanned by the McLean, Va.-based company, which says its client list includes 540 companies; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs.
But ID.me's $86 million contract with the IRS has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans' facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come. There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared

I think deciding the laws around privacy and how data is stored or shared is something they should do BEFORE not after in use.
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You may not know it personally but there is a lot of identity theft. You may know I am on a dating site. Anyone I am interested in gets a background check but a facial scan first from an app I belong to. You can't imagine what some of these Bas*&*ds are capable of.
I was chatting with someone the other day. I made him confess to me who he really was. I knew he was not the man who was pictured in the profile. I asked him if he was a catfish. In the middle of our "normaL" conversation. He said he was. I thought he was joking. He sent me a picture. He is a man from Ghana trying to support his family. Yes, truth. I broke him down (I won't say how) and his conscience took over.
I turned in his profile to the site security but I continued to speak to this man and he told me of his plight and he has a 6 year old son to take care. He has resorted to the scamming. As much as this broke my heart, I finally cut him loose promising him I would pray for him and his family. That is it; no money was sent. When I think of the money I spend on frivolous things it tears me up even though I give to charity. When I met poverty "face to face", it changed me. Love changes everything.
 
I don't have a problem with facial recognition.
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On the IRS/government side of it, I don't care.
However, what concerns me is there's room for errors. I read in the news a couple of days ago that some guy spent 5 days in jail over mistaken identity.
And as I mentioned a few years ago here, numerous people in this city have insisted I was somebody else- FOUR different people said this!!! it's downright creepy.
 
I like how they want to do a lot of things and yet I still haven't been able to get a hold of anyone on the phone for the past two days. It keeps telling me to try again the next day. That's how understaffed they are.
 
Devi said:
@fuzzybuddy, I'm wondering if you can get a paper SS card from your local Social Security Administration office.
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That's what I'm going to have to do. There's just no way to get through that online ID maze. One part was you'd get a code on your phone. A voice says ," zee six seven bee", but is it Z67B or z67b? And if you put in the wrong code, it blocks you out. It is a really poor system. It's so bad you have to wonder why nobody noticed this before they rolled it out.
 
IFortuna said:
Check my message to OP. You have no idea how pervasive ID theft is.
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Actually, I am acutely aware of the ID theft potential. Here are some more links in addition to the one I posted in post #4, illustrating the security vulnerabilities in the facial recognition technology:

kfp.kaspersky.com/news/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-biometric-authentication-technology

arstechnica.com/tag/facial-recognition/

www.eff.org/pages/face-recognition

Authoritarian nations like Russia and China use facial recognition technology to track political activists and to keep the population in general monitored. 1984 revisited.
 
I run into ID.me while trying to do my 2021 taxes, nothing was more dorked up than this. Spent a lot of frustrating time tying to get a decent photo of our driver's license with the smart phone to no avail. The license had a glossy finish and the photos were blurry. They keep sending me an email to do a video conference. Ignoring it for now. All I originally wanted was my AGI from last year. My wife finally got a selfie but that was unusable also according to them.

I guess I'll need to take the tape off my front camera on the laptop!
 
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JustinCase said:
I run into ID.me this while trying to do my 2021 taxes, nothing was more dorked up than this. Spent a lot of frustrating time tying to get a decent photo of our driver's license with the smart phone to no avail. The license had a glossy finish and the photos were blurry. They keep sending me an email to do a video conference. Ignoring it for now. All I originally wanted was my AGI from last year. My wife finally got a selfie but that was unusable according to them.
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Does that mean ID.me works with the IRS site? I'd never heard of it before the SSA told me.
If so, would it work with an expired ID?
 
JaniceM said:
Does that mean ID.me works with the IRS site? I'd never heard of it before the SSA told me.
If so, would it work with an expired ID?
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I don't know if it's linked to any .gov site, But if you need information it's what comes up on a search.

Don't know about the expired question, probably not, nothing seemed to work for us.

Oh and by the way I discovered a copy of our 2020 tax returns with our AGI that I had emailed to myself in my email archives. Saved them to a flash drive though.
 
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I entered an account on the ID.me system before obtaining a California Real ID drivers license that will increasingly be required for airline travel and other things. Yes it did required some effort to get through its online system.

I'm not one that worries about its possible misuse because I did my homework learning how it is run. There are many civil libertarians and powerful pro illegal immigration corporations that hate any national identification measures that I have little sympathy for as it contributes to USA overpopulation, environmental destruction, as well as much cultural and societal turmoil. Many corporations benefit from continued illegal immigration so have monkey wrenched any legislation meant to reduce identification laws. Worse it allows many criminals to live in the USA without being identified. Yeah the some of the same that are stealing our id's.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-rights-national-id-card/619772/
snippet:

In the American psyche, however, a national ID card conjures images of an all-knowing government, its agents stopping people on the street and demanding to see their papers. Or at least that’s what leaders of both parties believe. The idea is presumed to be so toxic that not a single member of Congress is currently carrying its banner. Even those advocates who like the concept in theory will discuss its political prospects only with a knowing chuckle, the kind that signals that the questioner is a bit crazy. “There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it,” says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Admittedly, this is probably not the best time to propose a new national ID. A large minority of the country is rebelling against vaccine “passports” as a form of government coercion. Yet public opposition to a national ID has never been as strong as political leaders assume. The idea has won majority support in polls for much of the past 40 years and spiked to nearly 70 percent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
 

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