The IRS announced on Monday it’s dropping plans to require taxpayers to sign up for and use facial recognition software. The plan had been to require people to use a service provided by a third-party company, ID.me, to verify their identities when accessing documents or making payments online. It was already being rolled out for people who created new online accounts this year, and was going to kick in for existing accounts by this summer.
The decision comes after backlash from advocates and lawmakers over privacy concerns. Tonya Riley, a privacy and cybersecurity reporter at CyberScoop, joins us to discuss. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Tonya Riley: The idea that the IRS wanted to use facial recognition just so people could log on to an account to see their tax records was not one that was very well received by privacy advocates, civil liberties advocates and, maybe more surprisingly, members from both parties in Congress. There were a lot of concerns about such a massive amount of Americans’ data being collected by a third-party private company. We’re talking about biometric data — this isn’t something like your credit card number. You can’t replace your face in quite the same way. There were a lot of concerns, you know, what is this company? What are they doing to secure this data? Why does the IRS need to use facial recognition? And there just weren’t many answers from the agency, so we saw a…
