IRS FACIAL RECOGNITION FOR ONLINE FILING

IRS facial recognition for online filing. Ever since the increase in Social Security, Identity Theft, and other types of fraud, the IRS has been gearing up, and putting more safety standards into play to help slow the tide of stolen Social Security numbers, stolen tax refund checks, and the increase in identity theft, along with tax refund fraud that has exploded in recent years. The Internal Revenue Service will now require people who access and pay their taxes online to enroll in a third party facial recognition company starting this summer. 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. IRS facial recognition for online filing.

According to the IRS, ID.me is a "Trusted technology provider" of identity verification services. Anyone who already has an ID.me account form another government agency can sign in with those credentials. 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 of lease, or trade of biometric data. "It can share information with its partners with users explicit permission, according to its website. 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.

All that may be, but the worrisome part is that we have heard these stories before, only to have such large data holders themselves get hacked, with the result being hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of ID's released to criminal organizations. So what happens if a criminal organization gets your facial ID ?