By Paresh Dave
OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) – Three U.S. senators on Tuesday called on the Department of Labor to help states find alternatives to identity verification provider ID.me for screening people seeking unemployment aid because they said its technology raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns.
The Internal Revenue Service recently dropped verification through ID.me as a mandatory step for people filing their taxes online this year. But about half of U.S. states still use ID.me, which employs a mix of facial recognition technology and video-chat interviews to confirm the identity of unemployment applicants.
Activists have argued that facial recognition remains too faulty for use in government applications, and that people should have more privacy and control over face scans.
ID.me did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the request, which came in a letter from Democratic senators Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren.
Reuters reported last year that the IT Acquisition Advisory Council said it wrote to officials including the U.S. Department of Labor’s inspector general that the influential National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) may have interfered with open-competition requirements by recommending ID.me to the exclusion of others. NASWA is partially backed by the Department of Labor.
States have called ID.me an invaluable tool in curbing record unemployment assistance fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the use of ID.me has led to delays in approvals for some legitimate applicants after facial recognition failed to verify their identity and long waits for interviews with manual verifiers ensued.
(Reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by Mark Porter)
