Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kerng 2617 days ago
In the US you have to show your ID much more often compared to other parts of the world. Every bar you enter, or alcohol or drink you buy people ask for identification. This is not the case elsewhere.

So, it wouldn't surprise me, if the current administration would at least attempt such ideas.

4 comments

This is not generally the case in most parts of the US I've lived in either.

More importantly, it's purely a private business asking for your ID in this case, and only as an age check. In the vast majority of cases they don't record or really care about anything except your date of birth. No bar I've ever been to kept any kind of record that would have enabled them to tell the government that I had visited the establishment.

I’m not a lawyer, but Arizona’s age restriction law explicitly requires recording the details via mag stripe. Whether that applies to something not straightforward in the language I don’t know.

Either way, I routinely get comments about where I live, how my hair looks now, my birthday (coincides with a major date in the US). It’s very low level invasion of privacy, but most of the time I don’t want to small talk at the grocery store, I want to finish what I need to and go. N=1 and all that, but I get the point. At least no one under 21 ever drinks here.

They also stop doing it once you look old enough. I grew a full beard at 27 or so, and I haven't been carded for buying alcohol since.
Amusingly, I grew a full beard at 27 or so and started getting carded all the time!
I seem to remember that in Europe its not unheard of for police to ask to see "papers please" and fancy that its often the darker citizens that get asked that.

Not that the UK and USA don't have some problems in that area

The ID is for age verification, not Name or any other details.
It doesn’t matter what it’s intended for, it matters what it’s used for.
Ah yes think of the children the first resort of authoritarians.
ID verification of age when buying alcohol is practiced by many countries, not just US.