Have Some Face Time...New Req for Filing IRS Taxes Online

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Cybersecurity

The IRS will soon make you use facial recognition to access your taxes online

The agency is using private company ID.me to verify taxpayers’ identities

By Kim Lyons@SocialKimLy Jan 20, 2022, 6:07pm EST

The Verge |

"The Internal Revenue Service will require people who access and pay their taxes online to enroll in a third-party facial recognition company starting this summer (h/t Krebs on Security). Even those who have already registered on IRS.gov with a username and password will have to provide a government ID, a copy of a utility bill, and a selfie to ID.me, the Virginia-based identity verification company. You’ll take a video selfie with whatever webcam or mobile device you’re using to sign up, which seems likely to cause problems for people with older hardware or who don’t have access to one.

According to the IRS, ID.me is a “trusted technology provider” of identity verification services. Anyone who already has an ID.me account from another government agency can sign in with those credentials. Brian Krebs created a new ID.me account and wrote in his post that the sign-up process was time-consuming and glitchy. He got stuck about halfway through the process and had to start again from the beginning, then was prompted to join a video call with an ID.me representative — with a wait time of nearly three and a half hours.

In its “privacy bill of rights,” ID.me says it doesn’t “sell, lead, or trade biometric data to any third parties or derive any profit from the sale, lease or trade of biometric data.”

> It can share information with its partners with users’ explicit permission, according to its website, and when you register for an ID.me account, you have to accept the company’s biometric consent policy.

> The company collects facial and voice biometrics to verify identity and protect against fraudulent behavior and to “comply with a request from law enforcement or government entities where not prohibited by law.”

> And even if you delete your ID.me account, the company may retain your biometric data for several years, depending on “the nature of the data and relevant legal or operational retention needs.”

You may remember ID.me from earlier in the pandemic; more than two dozen states use the company to verify people applying for unemployment benefits. Motherboard reported in June 2021 that ID.me failed to identify some applicants and that they had difficulty reaching anyone at the company to remedy their problem. ID.me CEO Blake Hall told The Verge at the time that it uses a system similar to Apple’s FaceID or the way a TSA agent would compare a passenger’s face to their ID at an airport."

RELATED CONTENT

Face Recognition Is Being Banned—but It’s Still Everywhere

Two dozen cities and states prohibit use of the tech. But it’s on phones and is increasingly used in airports and in banks. 

Tom Simonite

Wired |

"In November, voters in Bellingham, Washington, passed a ballot measure banning government use of face recognition technology. It added to a streak of such laws that started with San Francisco in 2019 and now number around two dozen.

The spread of such bans has inspired hope from campaigners and policy experts of a turn against an artificial intelligence technology that can lead to invasions of privacy or even wrongful arrest. Such feelings got a boost when Facebook unexpectedly announced on the day of the Bellingham vote that it would shutter its own face recognition system for identifying people in photos and videos, due to “growing societal concerns.”

[...] At least seven states adopted face recognition to verify the identity of people applying for assistance such as unemployment benefits. Even Facebook’s headline-grabbing shutdown of its face recognition features came with a caveat: The company said it will retain the underlying technology, because it might be useful in the future as a way to unlock devices or secure financial services.

This is the paradox of face recognition in 2021: The technology is banned in some places but increasingly normalized in others. That’s likely to continue, because face recognition is unregulated in most of the US, as there’s no federal law covering the technology. . .

> Apple’s Face ID phone unlock system may be the most widely deployed and used face recognition system, but US airports are forerunners in normalizing its use in public spaces and interactions with the government.

> CBP first deployed the technology in 2016 in partnership with Delta Air Lines at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta to check the identity of people boarding international flights. The program has steadily expanded since, but it accelerated in 2021, in part because the agency determined that touchless technology was more valuable during a pandemic.

At the end of 2020, CBP had implemented face recognition gates for incoming travelers at 17 airports. This year it added the technology at 182 airports, which the agency estimates will cover 99 percent of inbound air travel to the US. The program stems from legislation passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks requiring biometric identity checks for anyone entering or exiting the US. Facial recognition is used to check outgoing international travelers at 32 US airports. CBP says it has processed more than 100 million travelers using face recognition and prevented more than 1,000 “imposters” from entering the US at air and land borders. . .

> Finance companies are also showing interest in face recognition to speed identity checks.

> Incode, an identity verification startup based in San Francisco, says its face recognition checked more than 140 million identities in 2021, roughly four times as many as in the previous three years combined. The company’s customers include HSBC and Citigroup, and it recently raised $220 million in funding from investors including JP Morgan.

Caitlin Seeley George, a campaign director at nonprofit Fight for the Future, finds the spread of face recognition in airports and other areas of daily life concerning. “We need to ban all facial recognition, because the harms of this technology far outweigh any benefits,” she says.

George considers seemingly benign or careful uses of the technology dangerous because they help normalize collection of personal and biometric data that can be hacked or exploited. “The more places people see it, the more comfortable people feel,” she says. “When we do things for convenience we may not be thinking through all the repercussions.”

At the same time, George is optimistic about containing face recognition. She points to Facebook’s decision to shut its tagging system, the spread of local bans, and legislation introduced to both houses of Congress this year by a group of Democratic lawmakers and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) that would ban use of face recognition by federal agencies. Similar bills were introduced in 2020 but did not proceed to a vote."