To be fair to the FinTech companies and their leadership, banking and finance laws are so draconian to the point where you'd rather store (and risk leaking) sensitive data than face even bigger fines from the government overlords. If you want that to stop, get rid of the PATRIOT Act and reform the KYC insanity.

The sad part is that your government ID is about as likely to be leaked by the government agency itself than it is by any third party that has an scan of it.

My driver's license is scanned every time I buy beer. I'm under no illusions that it's not quite readily available in any number of leaks or disclosures.

If that sounds defeatist, maybe it is. Nothing online is private. Once it's in a database, it's only a matter of time before it's exposed. History has proven this again and again.

You need to do this for background checks for employment, even though the employees for the background check service might be outsourced to a different country, and your government data had no protections in their jurisdiction.

I always do. I would have never made social media accounts if it required phone or ID. Thankfully I'm old so my accounts were made before normies flooded the net and started trusting everything.

Every hotel and his dog takes a copy of my passport, it’s basically public domain.

It was definitely a mistake. The internet was not meant to be taken seriously. Measures like real name policies are designed to make people take it seriously but that is to the detriment of the users who do.

Just look at Facebook. Users with real names sharing all kinds of inane schizo nonsense, extremism, building echo chambers without realizing it, becoming completely divorced from reality as perceived by the majority of people around them in meatspace, because they section themselves off in cyberspace.

When I started on the internet it was common to use real name, and indeed include things like addresses and phone numbers in usenet .sigs

>What I don’t like is the “live verification” apps that leave me no choice but to take a photo of it.

That's becoming the norm now, presumably because of concern that people are taking leaked scans from one site, and using it to commit identify fraud (eg. getting KYC scans from crypto exchanges and using it to apply for accounts at other crypto changes, for money laundering purposes).

You can use OBS to overlay your watermark on your webcam feed, then expose the composited output as a virtual camera that you select in the browser.

This is a really useful practice, going to implement it as well.

You have a choice of not using such apps.