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Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.

Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?

Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.

Its not as if it even helps since the numbers can be leaked and stolen and then abused & the situation ends up even worse since it is so centralised.

in Egypt, every person is born with a universal national ID number , which is standardized everywhere here, but it created some problems, it became extremely valuable to attackers. If leaked, it can be reused across completely different services ( and you can never change it under anycase )

Having the full name + national ID was enough to bypass verification and activate various services, and many people weren't tech savvy enough to realize how dangerous it was to share or leak that info

National ID numbers will not help with cross border situations like this.

for some reason.

The reason is there. It's no big secret. Pick up a history book.

Terrorism went from "kill one person to scare millions" to "stir shit up to cripple the adversary with the costs of prevention".

"The evil, I can tolerate; but the stupidity..." -Hubert Farnsworth

How can you possibly afford to pay $100k for something like this? That’s so much money!

As a guy named Chris Smith, I can tell you, people do absolutely "match people on first and last name", and it causes me no end of trouble.

You’re presenting this like a mistake born out of incompetence.

It isn’t. The institutions involved simply don’t care whether they are destroying the lives of random people. At all.

And why should they? They are completely unaccountable in practice, sometimes even in theory.

> How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...

The same Jobs that routinely denied publicly that he was the parent of his daughter, even though he knew? The same Jobs that cheated Wozniak financially? The same Jobs that led to a change in legal legislation on how organ transplants work?

The world needs to move on from this marketing bs that he was somehow a "great" man who is morally solid and must be doing the right thing. Apple is precisely the company founded by Jobs.

No, the best thing to do is get the press involved and make Apple and ideally the US gov fix their incompetent handling of this.

I get phone calls for a guy named Randy about his business. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the phone calls stop.

The simplest solution is to change my phone number. But

a) why should I have to? it’s my number, dammit!

b) how many accounts have 2FA? if I changed my number, what if I miss updating one that’s important?

c) it could happen again

If I change my number, however, that is the simplest way to solve the problem. It’s just, do I want to?

That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.