Hacker News
points by LoganDark 1 day ago | 0 comments
I'd be curious to hear your justification for why it's so much more important for Netflix to ensure there's a "real" phone number behind the account compared to banks.

(Note: I don't agree with any equivalency or even correlation between phone numbers and legal persons)

[–] direwolf20 1 day ago
Netflix could have their access to video content cut off if they don't comply with all the ridiculous power trips of content "rights" owners. Banks only have to comply with actual laws.
[–] LoganDark 1 day ago
Banks are required by law to perform KYC. They would otherwise face much greater consequences than Netflix ever would.

Phone numbers are irrelevant for that though, so the only reason banks would think they need it is a false correlation between phone numbers and identities.

Netflix also seems to think phone numbers have something to do with identities. But you'd expect banks to be more serious about verification.

[–] simonra 10 hours ago
Banks in the developed parts of the world only really need to know the national identifier of their customer to report their assets for tax purposes, and be capable of verifying passports/government id tied to the identifier when they show up physically to claim what's theirs. Asking about anything else is only needed because the Usians bullied everyone into wasting humanities limited resources on it because they're administratively stuck several centuries behind when it comes to governance.
[–] LoganDark 5 hours ago
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.)