Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

conic.al

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 209 posts

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#111

Post by nkrisc »

neximo64 wrote: post #31
Aozora7 wrote: post #26

This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.

Its not as if it even helps since the numbers can be leaked and stolen and then abused & the situation ends up even worse since it is so centralised.

Unique identifiers should be public. There shouldn’t be any leaking.

That also means they should be used simply as an identifier and not as any for of authentication or secret knowledge.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#112

Post by fairlyaday »

larsnystrom wrote: post #69
pibaker wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number. Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a…

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. As you said, Ireland might comply, which would’ve solved this particular issue.

The courts obviously never had an id document for the US to find. Is the US going to omit all partial identities to avoid false positives or is Ireland going to illegally investigate lists for the US from extra judicial processes that likely involve non-extraditable crimes? Will the US believe every country that says these investigations found no real citizen?

Not bending to the US might be less convenient at times but if you bend for them you will eventually be bending for China.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#113

Post by Almondsetat »

pibaker wrote: post #63
Almondsetat wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the one somehow conflating an identity card with your actual identity as a self, which seems extremely strange and spurious.

The one conflating the two isn't the author, but the state. A fixation on the state sanctioned representation of someone's identity instead of the actual, living person himself is exactly what caused TFA's author troubles.

You could ask every company to have a specialized department to handle investigations for these nuanced cases... or you could rely on the state/nation to give you some actual assuranced. National ID solves this. Does Apple have the budget? Yes, but then are smaller companies justified for fucking up? Wouldn't a more objective, verifiable, and automatable procedure be preferred to level the playing field?

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#115

Post by chrisjj »

pibaker wrote: post #37
Aozora7 wrote: post #26

This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.

Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced. Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sa…

> It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves.

The idea is you largely prevented the theft, and made it easier to prove, by linking to a physical verifiableb address.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#116

Post by shelled »

This scares me! Denial of service (in some cases you may not even have an alternative), in some cases custody, et cetera and that too based on a false positive or a flimsy match. And no one doubles checks it, no one bothers to make sure, and they are allowed to do that! All this is actual legal and no one pays for it once it's found out, and even if you have suffered. None.

And heaven's forbid if your actual ID and references (i.e you) have ended up in such places (or such list/s) by mistake or malice.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#118

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Aozora7 wrote: post #26

This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.

I'm from Greece, where I have a national identity number. In fact I've had several (maybe half a dozen?) national identity numbers. You see, the national identity number is, literally, the number on your national identity card, or in other words the serial number of the document; not the person. When the document changes, the number changes with it.

Same as with passports. Even in the Anglosphere people have passports with passport numbers. They could be used to uniquely identify the passport holder, except of course there are many passports, and therefore, many numbers, for each passport holder.

Small problem? Just update whatever database is holding the information for sanctionted persons (or, indeed, persons who should not be sanctioned)?

Turns out, that is not a small problem.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#119

Post by tonfa »

po1nt wrote: post #51
toasty228 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh? The reason is that the constitution doesn't explicitly allow the federal gov to do it, so it's a state power. It's not like you care about all the thing you enumerated, they literally ask you for your "race" when getting a driver's license, which is the defacto ID document anyways. You're installing flock cameras everywhere and gargling palantir's balls while they implement the surveillance state.

Yeah and that's exactly what shouldn't happen. Government's should not have a power to ask a private company for data under any circumstances and they should not make "race" a compulsory data to submit, so that you could exercise your rights.

In some European countries government (and private entities) isn't allowed to collect ethnicity information.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#120

Post by ButlerianJihad »

I found some very intriguing/disturbing things while I was paying for full access on Ancestry.com. Those genealogy sites have powerful searches over a lot of public-records databases if you pay them enough. So naturally, I investigated myself.

One of the biggest mind-benders was finding a person with a string of addresses going back 25+ years. Now I've lived in this area for 27, and for some reason, this person's addresses all coincided with mine. They had lived near every residence I ever had; they lived within a stone's throw of every clinic, every church, my college, every place I had a relationship with. One such person's "last known address" was an exact match for my previous address: apartment number and all. I found a profile on Facebook but it is unknown if these are real persons, or fictitious entities in the public record for some purpose.

Then, I found a person who seems to be real (has a Facebook profile with photo, lists a real place of employment, etc.) She shared my exact surname and had a given name that matches my ethnicity. She lived at the same street address for a long time, albeit a different apartment number. I was receiving mail for her.

At some point, this phantom wife/sister was conflated with me in the public record. Obviously someone got her unit number wrong if I got her mail. But my phone number was eventually listed as hers. She has found herself in debt, and is sometimes referred to a collection agency. I've gotten no less than 3 separate inquiries for delinquent debts, that are clearly not mine, that start coming through because her contact info is utterly conflated with mine, and apparently no valid, current info is giving them any leads.

The crazy thing I learned last year is that a collection agency doesn't need to divulge any details of the debt they hold to the person they contact. It is incumbent on the contactee to verify whether they reached the wrong person. I began following CFPB instructions on disputing the debt, but the collections agency clammed up and refused to answer any questions until I answered theirs (registered on their website, divulged a lot of PII). However, the joke's on them, because it is very easy to review credit reports and determine whether a debt is or isn't on my own record.

Post reply on HN