Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

One of my least favorite memes in western society is that individual people actually believe that the government has some say in defining your name or the boundaries of your family.<p>Everything from the idea of &quot;legally changed his name&quot; to &quot;same-sex marriage&quot; illustrates the problems of turning to city hall for approval or consent of individuals&#x27; and families&#x27; deeply personal and private matters.<p>I wish the US had two more constitutional amendments: our bodies are property belonging to us individually and we are free to do with them as we please (solves abortion debate, war on drugs, assisted suicide, et c) and that government has no authority to regulate private familial matters such as what terms we use to call ourselves, what terms we use to call our loved ones, or who is within or without our families and the terms we use to refer to them (solves the current state of marriage inequality for homosexual relationships and also the discrimination against families that practice nonmonogamy, as well as any other oppressive status-quo reinforcement these assholes may come up with in the future).<p>It takes a very special kind of oppressor to tell you what words you are allowed to use to call yourself, what things you are allowed to do to your own body, and who you are allowed to love and allow into your family.

With each passing day, I look less and less like a lunatic for avoiding facebook (and its ilk) like the plague.<p>You should try it.

Two comments on this:<p>We started <a href="http://www.nymrights.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nymrights.org</a> to combat issues like this. One of our long term goals is to get companies to adopt policies preventing data demands like this unless sufficient protections (read, laws) are in place. (if you&#x27;re a company debating adopting such a policy, I&#x27;d love to chat!)<p>Second, if you&#x27;re European, check out the European Court of Human Rights, which offers protection against privacy intrusions like this. It&#x27;s worth noting that some countries get more specific: Germany has the Telemedia Act, which specifically protects against problems like this.

How does Facebook intend to validate these government IDs?<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure they can&#x27;t. They want you to send a scan of some photo-id - that means that all the anti-tamper &#x2F; anti-forgery tech that might be on the actual ID will be non-existent.<p>If you are lying about who you are, it will take about 10 minutes in photoshop to come up with something that will pass their test.<p>Are there any countries that even provide validation services that facebook could use? As I recall, South Korea used to require residents to provide their national ID numbers to access most (all?) in-country websites. That ended up producing a ton of identity theft so they repealed that law.

I am going to get a lot of downvotes for this but I am still curious to hear what solutions the HN community could come up with for the problem Facebook is facing:<p>Some of the accounts have been hacked.<p>You locked the accounts as a security measure.<p>Now you need to validate that some person is the actual owner of the account.<p>How would you solve this problem? (Sending a code via text message to the owners mobile device wont work in every case since old accounts didn&#x27;t have to validate via phone number on registration)

What amazes me even more is that almost all of those people are screaming an shouting and are entering the ID the next day and forget about it.

So I got locked out about 10h ago and as I saw lots of people like me on twitter then I just went to bed without verifying anything. Wake up, account unlocked without questions.<p>I suspect this was related to the earlier news where Obama&#x27;s facebook was hacked [1]. Some junior dev at FB forgot a WHERE clause at a sql query or did something equally dumb to mitigate this.<p>[1] <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/uk-usa-obama-twitter-hack-idUKBRE99R0YQ20131028" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uk.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;uk-usa-obama-twitte...</a>

an ID-verified person - 1st level, 100%. Everything s&#x2F;he tagged, communicated with, etc... - 2nd level, 95%, everybody &quot;touched&quot; by 2nd level - 90%,... Just a few hundred thousands optimally selected, and the graph is well verified while maintaining an impression of the ID-checks being rare exceptional events.

A response to &#x27;The Zuckerberg Files&#x27; (<a href="http://zuckerbergfiles.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zuckerbergfiles.org&#x2F;</a>)?<p>I find it hard to justify a use for this type of info online? You can get money-related businesses because of the need to comply legally but why facebook?<p>Off topic: Does anyone think Google&#x27;s floating barge is a way to evade compliance when it comes to data monitoring? Theoretically they could go further offshore

This is the page about verifying your account:<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/385569904840341" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;385569904840341</a><p>Facebook accepts any government-issued ID that contains name and date of birth. Examples include:<p>Birth certificate, Driver’s license, Passport, Marriage certificate, Official name change paperwork, Personal or vehicle insurance card, Non-driver&#x27;s government ID (ex. disability, SNAP or national ID card), Green card, residence permit or immigration papers, Social Security card, Voter ID card<p>If you don&#x27;t have a government-issued ID, Facebook will also accept two of the following items that combined must show name and date of birth. Examples include:<p>Bank statement, Bus card, Check, Credit card, Employment verification, Library card, Mail, Magazine subscription stub, Medical record, Membership ID (ex. pension card, union membership, working or professional ID), Paycheck stub, Permit, School card, School record, Utility bill, Yearbook photo (actual scan or photograph of the page in your yearbook), Please cover up any personal information we don&#x27;t need to verify your identity (ex: credit card number, social security number).

This is a smart move by Facebook; they already sit on the worlds largest data trove (user profiles with likes, family member info, network info, tagged pictures, etc. etc.), and now they add the last part of the user verification step...

Facebook is still that popular? I deactivated years ago and never cared to go back. I will activate every once in a while, check the feed, and leave. I have over 1000 friends, but the feed has slowed down to an extreme and it&#x27;s mostly mommy&#x2F;kid pictures now. A lot of people in my social circles agree too. It&#x27;s pretty irrelevant as far as our social lives go. Instagram + Twitter is still pretty active. Hmm..wonder if it&#x27;s bigger in other states&#x2F;countries.

I encountered this, perhaps ironically, while attempting to deactivate my long unused Facebook account.<p>I was able to log in using my credentials (which I store in a keepass database), but since the account had been inactive for so long (I guess?) this was insufficient. After successfully providing my username and passphrase, I was prompted with a security question, the answer to which I did not recall (I had created the account many years ago).<p>The only remedy, according to Facebook support, was to provide a scan of a government ID (via email, of course). Nevermind that I knew the password. Nevermind that I had access to the email address associated with the account.<p>I told them I was unwilling to provide this, and they told me I was out of luck. I decided that leaving a phantom, inactive FB account in the wild was better than providing these people with what they wanted, and got on with my life.<p>After several weeks, I for some reason decided to try again - and at that time all I needed was my passphrase. Why? Who knows. Maybe it was my lucky day.<p>I don&#x27;t really know what the takeaway should be, but my personal lesson is that I should probably also store secret questions and answers in a password database, since apparently some services deem them to be required even when I have the passphrase.

Not as bad as Paypal with their requirement that you provide proof of SSN to unfreeze your funds that were frozen for no apparent legitimate reason.

:)) I don&#x27;t upload images&#x2F;scans of important documents on the internet what makes Facebook think they&#x27;re special.<p>I use my card online (because i have to) and I&#x27;m constantly checking my accounts for shady transactions but there&#x27;s no way in hell I share my id on the internet.<p>Every bit-coin website that asked for this lost my business and if Facebook does the same will happen to them.

Isn&#x27;t there a problem of copyright associated with Government ID?<p>In the UK, things like your passport are copyright to The Crown and there&#x27;s official guidance[1] on how to go about getting permission to make copies of them.<p>I&#x27;d imagine other countries are the same. So Facebook is asking it&#x27;s users to infringe government copyright.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/118584/crown-copyright.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;system&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;attachm...</a>

Something similar happened to me. I had several company accounts with a page on each. I tried to login one day and Facebook requested ID. It seemed to happen to me when I tried to login via incognito mode in Chrome (so that I didn&#x27;t have to logout of my main account first).<p>I still haven&#x27;t entered the ID but I manage one of the pages for a business (I also manage their website, twitter etc.) and I&#x27;m either going to have to enter the ID or give up the job.<p>I can&#x27;t see any reason Facebook require this. It seems like real scummy practice.

That actually happened to me at the beginning of the year. If I remember right I was in a foreign country (UK) (or just back from it) and Facebook asked me to log in and to scan my government ID (French one actually). However it was optional and there was a small link at the bottom of the page offering to skip that step (which i did without an hesitation).<p>Is there a difference here? I mean, can they still skip the step? The article does not say much. Anyway the design was made such that it was hard to know you could skip the step.

Wow. So, basically, Facebook says: &quot;You&#x27;re locked out. If you want to stay a Facebook user, you must provide your government issued ID, or else - get lost.&quot;<p>This is a glimpse of the future, if we let it slide. The Internet giants can amend their ToS as they see fit and you will have to comply or get out. And for many people getting out is not an option when all of their immediate circle is already on it. So they endure humiliation in order to stay in, as well.<p>There must be legal restrictions on this type of behavior.

Simple, do rely only on Facebook, be ready to ditch it at any moment.

I&#x27;m from Europe. If they will do it to me I will be forced to stop using Facebook. And I will laugh if they will make it happen in uk as people here don&#x27;t have such ID&#x27;s

Doesn&#x27;t really make sense to why FB would want people&#x27;s Gov IDs to then allow them to simply upload pictures, gossip, or comment of other people comments. Does this behavior remind anyone of 1984 and the whole idea about controlling people&#x27;s behavior&#x2F;thinking by pretending or actually monitoring their activities&#x2F;life? What is two-step verification, passcode generators or answer your secret questions, if not for this?

They should get you to pick 2-3 friends from the subset of your closest contacts that they trust[1] to receive a multi-part[2] password so that you can prove you&#x27;re you by your contact with your friends.<p>[1] i.e. Facebook believe they are real people who could verify your identity.<p>[2] It could be a form of n of m authentication so you wouldn&#x27;t need to get all of them.

I wonder how many people respond to such unreasonable request by uploading something... indecent and shocking, to say the least.

Lets all just remember that we make our own choices.<p>1. If you want to use Facebook, then you must follow the rules they set forth.<p>2. If you dont like #1. Just dont use it.<p>As consumers we all make choices that we need to make to benefit ourselves. If I dont like a grocery store, I dont shop there. If I get treated rude someplace. I find a new place that treats me better.

Meh. The government already knows I use Facebook. Facebook can extrapolate anything about me using the information it already has, including, I imagine, my driver&#x27;s license number and social security number.<p>I really don&#x27;t care at this point. I&#x27;m too deeply connected now to retract any of it.

Facebook keeps pushing the bounds of what&#x27;s acceptable in terms of personal privacy. They have given no indications that they will ever stop pushing the privacy boundaries. This behavior seems to be a major component of their operational&#x2F;business model.

Wow, the way that they display the Twitter quotes in the article is hideous! The icons are huge and distracting, and on top of that they don&#x27;t seem to understand the basic idea that all close quotes need to match up with an open quote.<p>&#x27;Open Quote Icon&#x27;<p>message<p>&#x27;Close Quote Icon&#x27;<p>-username<p>&#x27;Another Close Quote Icon&#x27;

I think you all are overreacting to this story.<p>You don&#x27;t <i>have</i> to provide a government ID to login back into Facebook. Alternatively, I was able to give them my bank passwords, private emails and a list of deep dark childhood secrets.

I read that title as &quot;Furry&quot; at Facebook. I guess I need to put on a second pot of coffee.

Business idea: Generate &quot;Government ID&quot; that is good enough to pass Facebook verification.

Atlast they did it..we can expect same from all other sites soon..

I like how how those people think they know better than to provide their personal information to Facebook on a login dialog that is supposed to help them get onto Facebook in the first place. The irony is just so thick I don&#x27;t even...

What is a Government ID?

Migrate to a Open Source social network instead then.

Why stop there? They could ask for the SSN as well.

Boycott Facebook.

Is it April 1st?