The IRS wants to scan your face

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

WASHINGTON _ Millions of Americans will soon have to scan their faces to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government's biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people's everyday lives.

Taxpayers will still be able to file their returns the old-fashioned way. But by this summer, anyone wanting to access their records - including details about child tax credits, payment plans or tax transcripts - on the IRS website will be required to record a video of their face with their computer or smartphone and send it to the private contractor ID.me to confirm their identity.

About 70 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services have already been scanned by the McLean, Va.-based company, which says its client list includes 540 companies; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs.

But ID.me's $86 million contract with the IRS has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans' facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come. There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/irs-wants-scan-face-171738919.html

Maybe Congress needs to make a law.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. How exactly will it work with identical twins?

Or someone who gets extensive facial surgery, perhaps after an accident or being burned? Surely I'm not the only person to think of these things.

[BlackSkimmer]

2. Well, my iPhone doesn't recognize me without my glasses on.

If I have to put my face out there for the IRS, maybe I'll wear one of those Groucho masks.

Lol, we should all do that.

[Patterson]

3. Biden needs to put the kibosh on this.

This is the kind of thing that will get a huge percent on the people very riled up.

[2naSalit]

4. Uhh, no thanks.

[Hekate]

5. Facebook collected a mountain of facial data by making a game out of it. In fact, they did that...

… with all kinds of personal data by making amusing games out if it. This was all early on.

My good friend had a lot of fun and invited me to join in, but somehow it just never appealed to me — I could see the potential for abuse all too clearly.

Aaaand now the godless, soulless, bastards of the IRS want a piece of that.

[dalton99a]

6. This shady outfit needs more exposure

Joy Buolamwini, an artificial intelligence researcher whose work in 2018 helped reveal the stark racial and gender biases of major tech companies' face-analyzing systems, said the company's reports have misconstrued or failed to cite earlier research into the technology's failures.

Buolamwini pointed to research in 2019 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal testing laboratory, that found higher rates of false positives on one-to-one algorithms for Asian and African American faces than Caucasian faces. Depending on the algorithm, those rates could be "10 to 100 times" higher, the researchers said.

Hall, who served as an Army Ranger, co-founded the company in 2010 as TroopSwap, a military-focused deals site that began verifying veterans' service for store discounts. In the years since, ID.me has exploded with help from tens of millions of dollars in private investments and public government contracts, largely from states seeking to verify unemployment claims.

But advertising is a key part of ID.me's operation, too. People who sign up on ID.me's website are asked if they want to subscribe to "offers and discounts" from the company's online storefront, which links to special deals for veterans, students and first responders. Consumer marketing accounts for 10 percent of the company's revenue.