IRS Has Second Thoughts About Selfie Requirement [View all]

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- NPR, Feb. 7, 2022.

The Internal Revenue Service is backing away from a proposed requirement that people submit selfies to access their information on the agency's website. First of all, to be clear: The IRS was not requiring that every taxpayer filing a return submit a selfie. It was only to verify the identities of people seeking to set up an account with the IRS to see their past returns or get information about child tax credit payments.

Still, it's an overreach, says Emily Tucker, director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. "The consequences of not agreeing to give up a photo of yourself, which is then stored in a corporate database, which is protected only by that corporation's own easily changeable privacy policies, is that you may not be able to comply with federal tax law under some circumstances," she told NPR.

The IRS says because of a lack of resources, it contracted out the identity verification to a Virginia-based company called ID.me. That is where taxpayers would have submitted their photos to, and that is where the photos would have been kept. Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says one of the problems with outsourcing this information is whether it's kept safe. "What it does is create another kind of target for criminals. Obviously, data breaches are a big issue. And, you know, the more areas that sensitive information is, the more likely it [will] be the target of a data breach."

- 18 federal agencies use some sort of facial recognition technology. ID.me says it does not sell the personal information of its users. "We do not sell data. Period. We will never sell data," ID.me co-founder and CEO Blake Hall told NPR. "Our mission as a company, the reason we exist, the reason I founded this company, is to put people in charge of their own information and to get it out of the hands of data brokers and credit bureaus, many of which are owned by foreign corporations." And the IRS is not alone in using the company; 10 other federal agencies do, as well as many states...

- More,
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/07/1078024597/want-information-from-the-irs-for-some-the-agency-wants-a-selfie