Instagram Asking For Your Government Issued Photo IDs Now, Too

The 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.<p>Graph search and its creepy implications were then nothing I needed to find personally objectionable anymore.<p>I no longer have to complain about the other sleazy, move-the-goalposts, amoral aspects of Facebook Instagram.<p>This latest one, I have to say, should not be surprising to anybody.<p>DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't like it. You will still have friends, I promise :-)<p>Before you file for account deletion, you might want to do two things:<p>1) use <a href="http://www.picknzip.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.picknzip.com/</a> 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.)<p>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)<p>This is, AFAIK, the only way to export your facebook friends' data<p>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.<p>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.

Hey all,<p>Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder) here. Just wanted to offer some clarification since there's some speculation about the reason &#38; scope for the verification mentioned in the article.<p>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 <i>very</i> small percentage of accounts, and doesn't affect most Instagram users. The ID is used only for account verification, and not retained permanently.<p>Hope that helps clarify things a bit.

I 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).

I 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.

What 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.

Why add any of your data to FB? Why not just use it like an <i>idiot box</i> 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 :-)

I like to imagine Mark Zuckerburg sits in his five star hotel strumming "career of evil" while he practices his smile in the mirror.<p>At some point you have to start attributing actions to malice.

I 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.<p>People, get off Facebook. I'm in college and haven't touched it in 11 months. I'm doing just fine. Nobody needs it.

I 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?<p>Reference: <a href="http://torrentfreak.com/court-throws-out-109-of-110-alleged-bittorrent-pirates-then-kicks-out-110th-too-130125/" rel="nofollow">http://torrentfreak.com/court-throws-out-109-of-110-alleged-...</a>

A 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.

Taking 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.)

Ah, I can already smell the class action lawsuit for massive ID theft down the road.

If 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.

Did anyone read the purported FB message? "drivers liscense"<p>I trust FB to spell correctly and use the right apostrophe. Very interesting set of responses here though.

The 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

If 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.

Got to wonder how long it will be until a Facebook account is a form of valid ID in itself.

On one hand, this is excessive. Really excessive.<p>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.<p>For the people to whom their Instagram account is really important, this might be a nice option (even if it is rather invasive).

Why 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

Soon they'll ask for a blood sample, and perhaps your genome. It's laughable how privacy is not taken seriously anymore.

I never had a facebook account and they make it harder and harder for me to get one.

I 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.

What next if you don't do this are they going to send round her flick and von smallhausen.<p>I am tempted to join instagram just so i can upload a picture of ian lavender - "Don't tel Him Pike"

FB &#38; 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.

Now that it is (ostensibly) appropriate for web sites to ask for photo IDs, that opens up new opportunities for phishing and identity theft.

Just when you think FB can't be any creepier.

Another site which I will nevcer be a member of.

HN, 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)"<p>For FB's, they have to excuse from making an open source client side pre-upload number-removing tool.

LOL! This is surreal.

People easily forget that Facebook was funded by the CIA and remains their biggest success in intelligence gathering.