IRS to Require Taxpayers to Take Selfies of Themselves When Accessing and Paying Taxes Online

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) says facial recognition will soon be required when a person needs to access their taxes.

As if the government didn’t already have enough of our information, now we have to show them our faces when we access our taxes. Or, could this be beneficial to our safety?

Starting this summer, the IRS is going to require people to enroll in a third-party facial recognition company in order for taxpayers to access and pay their taxes. This includes people who have already registered on IRS.gov, The Verge reports. It doesn’t matter that you have a login and password; you will now have to provide a current government I.D., a copy of a utility bill, along with a selfie.

The IRS claims the Virginia-based third-party company, ID.me, is a “trusted technology provider” of identity verification.

ID.me says in its “privacy bill of rights” that it does not “sell, lead, or trade biometric data to any third parties or derive any profit from the sale, lease or trade of biometric data.” It states, however, that it can share people’s information with its partners with a user’s explicit permission.

The company will take a person’s facial recognition and voice biometrics in order to protect taxpayers’ identity against fraudulent behavior and to “comply with a request from law enforcement or government entities where not prohibited by law.” And it doesn’t matter if you delete your I.D. Me account, the company may keep your biometric data for several years if “the nature of the data and relevant legal or operational retention needs.”