this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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[โ€“] infeeeee@lemm.ee 40 points 4 months ago (10 children)

What exactly is a KYC selfie? Is it a photo of an ID card? I figured out WUI is WebUI. The author uses some strange acronyms I never heard before.

It's very American that they can steal your identity with just one photo. My European state issued ID has data on both sides, so if someone would take a photo of it won't be enough for anything. Also if you loose it you just get a new one and noone can use the old one for anything.

[โ€“] maltfield@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Author here. A "KYC Selfie" is a selfie photo where you hold-up a State-issued photo-identity document next to your face. This is not a US-specific thing; it's also used in the EU.

I used to work for a bank in Europe where we used KYC seflies for authentication of customers opening new accounts (or recovering accounts from lost credentials), including European customers. Most KYC Selfies are taken with a passport (where all the information is on one-side), but if your ID has data on both sides then the entity asking you for the KYC seflie may require you to take two photos: showing both sides.

Some countries in the EU have cryptographic authentication with eIDs. The example I linked-to in the article is Estonia, who has made auth-by-State-issued-private-key mandatory for over a decade. Currently MEPs are deciding on an eID standard, which is targeting making eIDs a requirement for all EU Member States by 2016.

I recommend the Please Identify Yourself! talk at 37c3 about the state of eID legislation as of Dec 2023 (and how to learn from India, who did eID horribly wrong):

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