[Amadou]

I'm surprised the article missed the single biggest problem with requesting copies of "identity documents" - the company you send them to has no way to verify them!

In his example they wanted copies of utility bills and a driver's license either domestic or foreign. Clearly they have no way of verifying the authenticity of foreign driver's licenses from arbitrary countries. At the very best they might have a book that shows samples of valid licenses, but no way can they verify the data on the license.

And if they could do it that would be a pretty serious breach of privacy. The government agency that issues licenses has no business telling arbitrary people if so and so lives at a certain address - back in 1989 the actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot point-blank at her front door by a stalker who looked up her address at the local dept of motor vehicles precipitating a major change in privacy of license records.

Basically any of these documents can be photo-shopped or even made up completely from scratch and the company requiring them would not be any wiser.

So, these policies don't improve security for anyone - legitimate customers become less secure and the company is just as susceptible to fraud.

[true_religion]

> I'm surprised the article missed the single biggest problem with requesting copies of "identity documents" - the company you send them to has no way to verify them!

I'm not so sure about that. Bars have machines to scan your drivers licence and verify if its real, so why can't other companies do the same thing.

As for arbitry licences...they could either not work for the US, or demand passports which can be verified against someone.

[Amadou]

I'm not so sure about that. Bars have machines to scan your drivers licence and verify if its real, so why can't other companies do the same thing.

No, those machines don't work that way. They just check for integrity in the physical license itself hologram in the right place, etc -- something you can't do with a scanned copy of a license. They don't have a master database that they phone home and check in with to see if the data on the card is forged.

Actually, they do have a database - of the info they read off the cards. The bars use that info for two things: (1) if you are enough of a troublemaker, they put you on the list to reject next time. (2) they also sell all of their card scan info to the data brokers. That's right, places like Equifax, TRW, etc know the time and date of every time you went to a bar that scanned your ID.