When retired web developer<\/a> Catherine Kunicki tried to sign up for her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in downtown Brooklyn, the AdvantageCare Physicians website rejected her. She received an error message that her identity couldn't be verified through Experian, a credit monitoring company. <\/p>\n...<\/p>\n
When Motherboard tested the AdvantageCare Physicians website (as a hypothetical 65+ Brooklyn resident), we confirmed that it is using Experian to verify patients\u2019 identities. The website claims that AdvantageCare Physicians does not get information about a patient\u2019s credit score. But Experian is a credit reporting company and big data company, and the tool the vaccine scheduling website is using verifies identities by using information that shows up in people\u2019s Experian credit histories. <\/p>\n
This is a problem for a lot of reasons. One-in-five Americans is \u201ccredit invisible\u201d or has poor credit, according to a report from the nonprofit Corporation for Enterprise Development. Black Americans are more likely to have poor credit; they are also disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Still, this Experian tool and tools like it\u2014collectively called remote identity proofing\u2014are used for all sorts of things they shouldn\u2019t be: \u201cThe remote identity proofing (RIDP) process confirms an applicant\u2019s identity based on their credit information,\u201d the Corporation for Enterprise Development report states. \u201cThis process has a success rate of only 78 percent, and applicants with little or no credit history and the millions of victims of identity theft cannot complete an RIDP.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since 'we' don't trust the government to run healthcare, we end up with bullshit like this: When retired web developer Catherine Kunicki tried to sign up for her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in downtown Brooklyn, the AdvantageCare Physicians website rejected her. She received an error message that her identity couldn't be verified through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30835,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30834\/revisions\/30835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}