See, I don't believe that IDs are only used for verifying that someone in-person is the owner of an online account, because if that were the case, I wouldn't need an ID for banks that don't have physical locations. Rather it seems ID verification is used to correlate a legal person's accounts with each other, and make it more difficult to perform confidence scams. (Confidence scams typically include things like using a different identity to disconnect your actions, and their consequences, from your own legal identity.)

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direwolf20 a day ago | parent | next [-]

They are. And the government sets an ID standard, everyone implements it and it's done. There's no ever escalating paranoia.

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simonra a day ago | parent | prev [-]

But the ID is of course tied to a nationally centralized auth/login system for the digital variant of the services, as it has been for decades. The notion of being capable of using someone else's ID in the first place is just absurd in this day and age.

	▲	LoganDark a day ago \| parent [-]
		I've never had to authenticate to any sort of federal or state system to create or operate a bank account. I just provide ID and SSN and that's it. I have to do it to access my taxes, but that's because the tax agency itself is already on the federal or state level. Also, glad to hear that identity theft has stopped existing, it's about time. Hmm, why are identity fraud alerts still a thing? I'm sure they just haven't gotten around to removing it yet.