What Did the IRS Want With Your Selfies?

Facing mounting bipartisan pressure, the Internal Revenue Service announced yesterday that it’s walking back plans to deploy facial recognition software to identify taxpayers.

In November, the IRS signed an $86 million contract with identity verification startup ID.me, announcing that it would require taxpayers to provide personal, identifying materials, including selfies, to access their tax records. Privacy and civil rights advocates responded immediately, forming a coalition of close to 20 groups—from the National Lawyers Guild to the Council on American-Islamic Relations—that criticized the “destructive results of facial recognition technology…from police using it to track Black Lives Matter protesters, to wrongful arrests, to manipulative marketing.” The IRS plan, those groups said, “would have expanded the scope of these harms and impact the lives of millions more people.”