Sounds like a step in the right direction but some part of me can't stop thinking some three letter agency is holding onto all the data they can get. Just like the story that Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich exposed about the CIA retaining US citizen bulk data in the Deep Dive I and II programs.
Pictures of your room are also valuable. I imagine their implementation forced you to use the hw cam and not OBS et al for fraud prevention.
The real danger is the precedent it sets. CBP wants to force you to take a photo on departure for example. I don’t think facial recognition is near accurate enough. A bug or misidentification could put you through hell.
AFAIK, it's not illegal. The compromise on gun registration was that gun shops retain the registration data. The ATF only gets ownership over that data if the shop goes out of business. The only legal restriction is that they can't index it with a computer... which is stupid and silly, but hey, I don't write the laws.
[1] ... technically, the data is, in fact, digitally stored so that an electronic equivalent of microfiche-scanning can be used to find information. That scanning is still done by hand because of the 1986 law banning registry creation.
There is no human right to not have it discovered a person purchased a firearm that was later used in the commission of a crime.
In the same sense that there is no human right to not have it discovered that a car that ran someone over is registered to a particular person, or that a plane that crashes into a neighborhood was scheduled to fly under a particular flight-plan and be operated by a particular pilot.
In general, society (American society included) assigns additional responsibilities of care and auditing to ownership and operation of machines and equipment with a high probability of causing the death of a third party if they are mis-used.
If you are implying that people have a right to privacy, sure; except American law makes far more important and sensitive information a matter of public record. Things like home and car ownership are entirely public as it is. While you could argue that this shouldn't be public, there's still valid reasons for those things to be tracked in a central database. Likewise, I can think of valid reasons for why the government would need to know who owns a particular gun.
If you are implying that a lack of a functioning Form 4473 index protects the right to bear arms... I'm not sure I agree with that. If the federal government really got a bug up it's butt about banning private firearm ownership, they wouldn't need a Form 4473 index. They would just need to ban the manufacture and import of new firearms and/or ammunition, and let the now-grandfathered old weapons trickle out of the market - no need for a gun grab.
This is how they banned fully-automatic weapons, after all. You can technically still buy them, but the cost of a grandfathered automatic weapon is so astronomical that you would never dream of actually firing it.
Neither illegal nor a real "registry" in any useful sense, since they're not allowed to digitize or automatically index the paper records, which are frequently mangled or water damaged beyond discernibility[1].
Edit: the National Tracing Center is currently so burdened with paper copies that their floor is literally collapsing[2].
IIUC, digitize yes, index no. Incoming records are photographed and stored into a non-indexed image repository (otherwise, using the data would be completely impractical because of the literally-collapsing-floor problem you mentioned).
> “Taxpayers will have the option of verifying their identity during a live, virtual interview with agents; no biometric data – including facial recognition – will be required if taxpayers choose to authenticate their identity through a virtual interview,” the IRS said in a Feb. 21 statement.
Uhm, but.. the virtual interview can be recorded, and biometrics extracted. Did anything actually change?
A photo is no longer required - now you can do a video so that we can get your face from multiple angles and generate a better 3D model for our facial recognition tech!
Probably I am being paranoid but I think I will go with the photo
Login.gov has been available for years, so the IRS can't lean on the excuse that it wasn't ready yet. This smells more like organizational incompetence.
IRS to adopt Login.gov as user authentication tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30430851 - Feb 2022 (86 comments)