alt Hacker NewsThis is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.
Replies
Its not as if it even helps since the numbers can be leaked and stolen and then abused & the situation ends up even worse since it is so centralised.
Attaching numbers to people is unbelievably creepy. My identity is not a number. We recoil at the idea of having assigned and tattooed numbers on our bodies and I don't feel it's okay to do it, just so you could maybe avoid misidentification.
in Egypt, every person is born with a universal national ID number , which is standardized everywhere here, but it created some problems, it became extremely valuable to attackers. If leaked, it can be reused across completely different services ( and you can never change it under anycase )
Having the full name + national ID was enough to bypass verification and activate various services, and many people weren't tech savvy enough to realize how dangerous it was to share or leak that info
He has a passport with a number on it. Why isn't that sufficient? There are also multiple countries involved in this story.
National ID numbers will not help with cross border situations like this.
for some reason.
The reason is there. It's no big secret. Pick up a history book.
Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.
Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?
Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.