[hansvm]

> I would say that I am a bit shocked at the lack of regulation regarding access to people’s identity documents as compared to credit cards.

To some degree it's because there isn't much point. You can call up my home state today, pinky promise that you're me, hand over $20, and they'll ship you my birth certificate or other important documents. We don't have private keys or other kinds of unique identifiers assigned at birth, so attempts to lock it down further would lock people out of their own identities.

Scale does matter, and a breached database of identity documents is definitely worse than having to pay a nominal fee and wait a few days, but given the context of other manual labor like securing loans I'm not sure the extra ease would result in much more fraud.

[incompatible]

It's supposed to work in quite a few countries, and not all make it so easy. Given the requirement in my country for ID when obtaining any other ID, I'm actually puzzled about what happens if you lose everything.

https://stripe.com/docs/identity/verification-checks

[PeterisP]

For me, the general process would require a police report for lost/stolen ID (mandatory, so that it can be marked as lost/stolen so that it would be detected if someone tries to use it) and verification with the data they have on file - nowadays with EU biometric IDs they can be quite sure that I'm the same person as the one who got the previous ID as the face and fingerprints can be verified.

[maccard]

There's an honor system in many places. You sign a document stating you are who you say you are, and have it witnessed by someone who is "deemed trustworthy" - local police, teacher, clergy.