Tax filing?
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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A few years ago the IRS website wanted me to take a "video selfie" using a webcam to log in to access my tax stuff. I said Fuck That and ended the session. Finished my taxes through a 3rd party vendor instead.
There is no way the states is a real place. That's beyond crooked and clearly trying to push people into using a 3rd party product.
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I ordered some alcohol online because I couldn't find the brand of rum I was looking for locally. They did some age verification before I could order, same that I could have encountered in a grocery store.
Of course they just got sent a token and not a photo id which changes the calculus some. I'm against trusting random websites with personal information, not an age block on its own.
In the US it is becoming common for federal services to require ID.me verification. I’ve never really had a problem with social security requiring ID verification. I do have a problem with data portals requiring it.
I even have a problem with ID.me, it's a private company that the US government wants you to give your driver's license and other information to. I don't trust that.
Absolutely valid. In the context of identity verification, I trust ID.me more than random companies that do not have government contracts because government contracts come with security and compliance regulations that require regular audit and make the chances of breach less likely. In either case, it’s a private company and, as any security nut would have told you, when it gets sold all bets are off like 23andme. Even more importantly, in the US, any kind of ID verification is a terrible idea, government or private, because we have no data regulation or privacy constraints. I call out the US here because we have no GDPR equivalent (CCPA wouldn’t hold up to federal data). Even if ID verification were conducted by the government, it can still be used for gnarly shit like we saw with ICE and DOGE.
On a sliding scale of evil, ID.me is the evil I know will currently fight to continue remaining the only evil which is the only solace I have in the US.
ID.ME is awful and buggy.
Identifying yourself for official business on a government site is not the same as providing official ID to a random picture sharing site. Pretty much every service has had a leak which required heaps of people to change their trusted password. How would you fix this when they leaked your full official identity?
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Personally I've found online banking, medical and travel services rather hard to resist.
Those new mobile phone things the kids are using also have biometrics and internets and look pretty handy to have around.
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It's just a new "Think of the children", only worse than going after backdoors in cryptography.
Now it's "OS-level" identity checks, which means TPM+secure boot hardware lockout.
This is just more child abuse disguised as "parental rights". It becomes clear how harmful this is when you realise that not all parents have their childrens best interests at heart (even if they think they do and sincerely mean well) and allowing parents to censor the information children have available to them allows them to censor information that the children learn only too late to prevent harm.
The issue is that any software is a blackbox when running.
There is no way for a user to know what code is running let alone verifying that a specific code is actually running on a device, combine that with a sector that keeps wanting more data.