[xorcist]

"Identity theft" is newspeak right up there with "intellectual property". It serves the sole purpose of diminishing real theft. If someone says "we gave all your money to this other guy, but it's not our fault because he had stolen your identity" doesn't make it so. There are cases of mistaken identity, and with criminal intentions, but there is also an enormous majority of not checking identity because someone was lazy.

[stevekemp]

Which is what leads to this comedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

[SoftTalker]

"Identity theft" is a term invented to push the responsibility for fraud back on the person who is being impersonated rather than on the person or organization that failed to properly identify the impersonator.

[oska]

This is such an excellent comment (along with SoftTalker's reply) and made me think. I've long rejected the term "intellectual property", along with the delusional/fraudulent term "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to real things like LLMs and machine learning) and "money laundering" but hadn't previously stopped to think about "identity theft". Now I have.

I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.