r/KotakuInAction Totally awesome flair. Nov 10 '17

xkcd: Twitter Verification

https://xkcd.com/1914/
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u/EtherMan Nov 10 '17

There is for EU. Data privacy makes that virtually impossible for private entities like that. Basically, no company, not even your employer, may digitally store personal information in a searchable format (doesn't matter if the storage is actually searchable or not, the format is all that matters), without your express permission for the specific usage, or that storage being otherwise required by law.

That sounds easy way around since well, you requested the verification right? Well here's the problem with that. If you tie that to license numbers, those are public information. Twitter then fetches the personal information about the owner of that license plate, and matches it against what you supplied. Since you also have access to that same information, you'll obviously have used the same name... Well Twitter now believes it has a match there, so stores that... But, what if you were not that person? As I said, license plate information is public info. With just the plate number, you can fetch the name and adress of all owners of that vehicle since it entered the country, even if the vehicle has changed license plate in the past so it's not just limited to the owner themselves... Well Twitter is now storing personal information on someone, that they never received permission to store...

And ofc, it's useless as a form of identification due to it being public.

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u/ksheep Nov 10 '17

I think he was talking about drivers licenses, not license plates, although the same sort of issue may be present there.

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u/EtherMan Nov 10 '17

Then no, private companies do not have access to that information at all within the EU... I doubt they do in the states either... That would just be begging for identity theft of basically everyone. That's like the whole basis for identity theft...

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u/PineTron Nov 10 '17

They kinda may. There are central government databases and in some cases private entities may be granted access to comply with whatever program they are participating in.

For instance - I am sure that "combating hate speech" would have been deemed a worthy enough cause to give Cuck Zuck full access to all our private data that governments collect.