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Stripe Identity

stripe.com

211–220 of 557 posts

Re: Stripe Identity

#211
post #2

I've never seen a company release incredible products with as high velocity as Stripe has over the last few years. Truly incredible. $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price.

Sadly out of reach for small projects. For example if you had a site with 100k users, you'd barely cover server costs with Ad Sense. $150k to check all of them? Would never happen :/ Maybe if they could pay for verification themselves?

In many cases you don’t need to verify the identity of every user. You can use some signal to determine when you need ID, or require it for accessing certain products/features.

Re: Stripe Identity

#214
post #2

I've never seen a company release incredible products with as high velocity as Stripe has over the last few years. Truly incredible. $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price.

Sadly out of reach for small projects. For example if you had a site with 100k users, you'd barely cover server costs with Ad Sense. $150k to check all of them? Would never happen :/ Maybe if they could pay for verification themselves?

You don’t need to verify a user’s real identity to serve them AdSense.

Re: Stripe Identity

#215
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Stripe would start a pre-ipo stock market. I guess only incumbent regulation prevents this, it’s not a technology problem.

I believe Carta already does this: https://cartax.com/

I think Stripe pre-ipo-ing on their own platform would show great cojones, but I think they are more careful than I’d be about such things.

Re: Stripe Identity

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone looking for the answer, in the US it's $1.50 / ID verification and $0.50 for Social Security Number lookup (an American tax number that is officially not for identity purposes but used that way all the time).

I'll give my SSN to a healthcare provider, and maybe a bank. Random vendor using Stripe? Probably not. Edit: to be a little less flippant, what is an example of a Stripe user to whom you would be comfortable giving your SSN?

An employment related service could legitimately require a valid SSN.

Re: Stripe Identity

#217

Wow, I would like to know about this has been engineered and QA'd. Owning this system on the product side would keep me awake nights. One question is tolerance on false negatives (you don't look enough like your govt id) - maybe they collect additional information, and use third party service for corroboration. If my Stripe Identity can be used across vendors, it's almost like a digital passport. I'll ask, in jest, a…

They've been doing it for years internally, I'm sure it's not much more stressful from a, "Oh did we let a bad guy through?" perspective, at least.

Definitely more stressful from a, "Did we let a customer of a new product down?" perspective though, for sure.

Also, not for nothing but has Estonia kept their system up to date? I've not been impressed with how it had aged last time I looked into it (a few years back).

Re: Stripe Identity

#218
post #11

How does this work?

It's actually pretty cool (IMO; I'm biased). Drop-in browser-based user authentication that: * Uses various sophisticated heuristics to detect real vs fake IDs. * Matches the ID to the human face. * Detects whether the human face is live or not. * Dynamically requests more or less information depending on the confidence level. It also gets better over time based on the attacks and fraud attempts that Stripe itself se…

>* Uses various sophisticated heuristics to detect real vs fake IDs.

This means it will fail for a few individuals and you will be stuck trying to reach support who are going to be pointless and useless.

Mostly this will be an issue with people of non-white ethnic origins and people with older laptops/phones with poorer cameras.

This is obviously a useful product, but it is one the world would be much better of if it didn't exist at all.

Re: Stripe Identity

#219
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would that do to all the Stripes holding illiquid shares in a private company?

I'm not familiar with Stripe's situation, but there are non-public markets available for this kind of stock sale. You just can't buy from them unless you're already rich. I'd guess that long-term employees do have an amount of flexibility in that regard.

Unfortunately many companies have clauses in their options grants that prohibit employees from selling shares to any investor not approved by the company board (e.g. EquityZen).

Re: Stripe Identity

#220
post #2

I've never seen a company release incredible products with as high velocity as Stripe has over the last few years. Truly incredible. $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price.

Sadly out of reach for small projects. For example if you had a site with 100k users, you'd barely cover server costs with Ad Sense. $150k to check all of them? Would never happen :/ Maybe if they could pay for verification themselves?

If you're not offering a service for $, why do you need to verify identity?

What is the usecase?

This strikes me as classic HN bikeshedding.

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