IRS to abandon facial recognition plan after firestorm of criticism
The Internal Revenue Service has abandoned its plan to require Americans submit to a facial recognition check through a private company to access their online tax accounts following a firestorm of criticism from privacy advocates and members of Congress.
The IRS said Monday it would transition away from using a face-scanning service, offered by the company ID.me, in the coming weeks and would develop an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition.
The agency originally had said that starting this summer all taxpayers would need to submit a “video selfie” to the company to be able to access their tax records and other services on the IRS website. But lawmakers and advocates slammed the idea of mandating the technology’s use nationwide, saying that it would unfairly burden Americans without smartphones or computer cameras and would risk leaking sensitive data to hackers. Facial recognition algorithms have also been shown to work less accurately on darker skin.
“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS commissioner Charles Rettig said in a statement announcing the IRS decision. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/07/irs-idme-face-scans/
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And we got all the way through, 1040, Schedule A and Schedule 1, when the website made us go through ID.me to electronically sign our return (the return wouldn't be accepted without it), and we got all the way to where ID.me required us to submit a photograph of our driver's licenses, and that's when we hit the 
button. To get to that point, we had had to create an account with ID.me, do the two-factor authentication thing four or five times, and then we get the driver's license requirement. Fuhgeddaboudit.
Five hours of jumping back and forth between forms, instructions, and other forms shot to hell. The instructions consistently referred to lines on forms and schedules that didn't exist (as far as we could tell), like Line 10 on Schedule 1. And that's for a very vanilla return; no rental income of investment gains or losses, just income from our jobs, a dab of interest income, and my wife's Social Security survivor benefits. Simply ridiculous. We're going to print out our returns and mail them in. Yeah, it'll take 8 weeks or more to get our refunds, but damn if we're giving some private company (which pinkie swears reel gud that they'll take care of our identification information unless a hacker tries to use the impenetrable password 1-2-3-4-5).
