{"id":8605,"date":"2022-02-01T17:39:07","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T17:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/01\/id-me-finally-admits-it-runs-selfies-against-preexisting-databases-as-irs-reconsiders-its-partnership-with-the-company\/"},"modified":"2022-02-01T17:39:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T17:39:07","slug":"id-me-finally-admits-it-runs-selfies-against-preexisting-databases-as-irs-reconsiders-its-partnership-with-the-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/01\/id-me-finally-admits-it-runs-selfies-against-preexisting-databases-as-irs-reconsiders-its-partnership-with-the-company\/","title":{"rendered":"ID.me Finally Admits It Runs Selfies Against Preexisting Databases As IRS Reconsiders Its Partnership With The Company"},"content":{"rendered":"

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from the CEO-Blake-Hall-finally-understanding-bluster-can-only-take-you-so-far<\/i> dept<\/h3>\n

\nTech company ID.me has made amazing inroads with government customers over the past several months. Some of this is due to unvetted claims by the company’s CEO, Blake Hall, who has asserted (without evidence) that the federal government lost $400 billion to fraudulent COVID-related claims<\/a> in 2020. He also claimed<\/a> (without providing evidence) that ID.me’s facial recognition tech was sturdy, sound, accurate, and backstopped by human review.\n<\/p>\n

\nThese claims were made after<\/em> it became apparent the AI was somewhat faulty, resulting in people being locked out<\/a> of their unemployment benefits in several states. This was a problem, considering ID.me was now being used by 27 states to handle dispersal of various benefits. And it was bound to get worse, if for no other reason than ID.me would be expected to handle an entire nation of beneficiaries<\/a>, thanks to its contract with the IRS.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe other problem is the CEO’s attitude towards reported failures. He has yet to produce anything that backs up his $400 billion in fraud claim and when confronted with mass failures at state level has chosen to blame these on the actions of fraudsters<\/a>, rather than people simply being denied access to benefits due to imperfect selfies.\n<\/p>\n

\nAnother claim made by Hall has resulted in a walk-back by ID.me’s CEO, prompted by increased scrutiny of his company’s activities. First, the company’s AI has never been tested by an outside party, which means any accuracy claims should be given some serious side-eye until it’s been independently verified.\n<\/p>\n

\nBut Hall also claimed the company wasn’t using any existing databases to match faces, insinuating the company relied on 1:1 matching to verify someone’s identity. But this couldn’t possibly be true for all benefit seekers, who had never previously uploaded a photo to the company’s servers, only to be rejected when ID.me claimed to not find a match.\n<\/p>\n

\nIt’s obvious the company was using 1:many matching, which carries with it a bigger potential for failure, as well as the inherent flaws of almost all facial recognition tech: the tendency to be less reliable<\/a> when dealing with women and minorities.\n<\/p>\n

\nThis increased outside scrutiny of ID.me has forced CEO Blake Hall to come clean. And it started with his own employees pointing out how continuing to maintain this line of “1-to-1” bullshit would come back to haunt the company. Internal chats obtained by CyberScoop show employees imploring Hall<\/a> to be honest about the company’s practices before his dishonesty caused it any more damage.\n<\/p>\n

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\n\u201cWe could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud-fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,\u201d an engineer wrote in a message posted to a company Slack channel on Tuesday. \u201cBut it seems we can\u2019t keep doing one thing and saying another as that\u2019s bound to land us in hot water.\u201d<\/em>\n<\/p>\n

\nThe internal messages, obtained by CyberScoop, also imply that the company discussed the use of 1:many with the IRS in a meeting.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThose messages had a direct effect: Blake Hall issued a LinkedIn post<\/a> that admitted the company used 1:many verification, which indicates the company also relies on outside databases to verify identity.\n<\/p>\n

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\nIn the Wednesday LinkedIn post Hall said that 1:many verification is used \u201conce during enrollment\u201d and \u201cis not tied to identity verification.\u201d<\/em>\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose other than to prevent identity theft,\u201d he writes.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nHall’s post hedges things quite a bit by insinuating any failures to access benefits is the result of malicious fraudsters, rather than any flaws in ID.me’s tech. But this belated honesty — along with the company’s multiple failures at the state level — has caused the IRS to reconsider its reliance on ID.me’s AI<\/a>. (Archived link here<\/a>.)\n<\/p>\n

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\nThe Treasury Department is reconsidering the Internal Revenue Service\u2019s reliance on facial recognition software ID.me for access to its website, an official said Friday amid scrutiny of the company\u2019s collection of images of tens of millions of Americans\u2019 faces.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n

\nTreasury and the IRS are looking into alternatives to ID.me, the department official said, and the agencies are in the meantime attentive to concerns around the software.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThis doesn’t mean the IRS has divested itself of ID.me completely. At the moment, it’s only doing some shopping around. Filing your taxes online still means subjecting yourself to ID.me’s verification software for the time being.\n<\/p>\n

\nA recent blog post on ID.me’s site<\/a> explains how the company verifies identity as well as names the algorithms it relies on to match faces, which include Paravision (which has been tested by the NIST) and Amazon’s Rekognition, a product Amazon took off<\/a> the law enforcement market in 2020, perhaps sensing the public’s reluctance to embrace even more domestic surveillance tech.\n<\/p>\n

\nThis may be too little too late for ID.me. Its refusal to engage honestly and transparently with the public while gobbling up state and federal government contracts has expanded its scrutiny past that of the Extremely Online. Senator Ron Wyden wants to know<\/a> why the IRS has made ID.me the only option for online filing.\n<\/p>\n

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\nI\u2019m very disturbed that Americans may have to submit to a facial recognition system, wait on hold for hours, or both, to access personal data on the IRS website. While e-filing returns remain unaffected, I\u2019m pushing the IRS for greater transparency on this plan.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nBut e-filing is<\/em> affected. As the IRS’s spokesperson noted in a statement to Bloomberg<\/a>, ID.me is still standing between e-filers and e-filing.\n<\/p>\n

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\n[IRS spokesperson Barbara] LaManna noted that any taxpayer who does not want to use ID.me can opt against filing his or her taxes online.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nIt may be true that people with existing accounts might be able to route around this tech impediment, but new filers are still forced to interact with ID.me to set up accounts for e-filing. If spotty state interactions created national headlines, just wait until a nation of millions starts putting ID.me’s tech through its paces.\n<\/p>\n

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\u2013The Techdirt Team<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Filed Under: blake hall<\/a>, facial recognition<\/a>, irs<\/a>, privacy<\/a>
Companies: id.me<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n