Twitter aside, if any website or app ever asks this of you, please nope the fuck out.

I guess it only occasionally makes sense for government web sites and banks. X might have ambitions to become a bank, so in that sense it might make sense.

So another piece of advice: if twitter ever asks you if you want to start using it for banking, nope the fuck out.

You Americans should get to this century and start performing digital strong authentications like the rest of us. Sending picture of your ID to anyone is insane :)

How we do it here in Finland is that there are digital identity providers which use bank/mobile carrier to identify you. They they use MFA when identifying you. Any service can use these services to do strong authentication for you. And they don’t cost anything for the customer, and is really cheap for the company who wants to identify you. It is also build into the law that you must identify people using these, to avoid identity theft.

How doss your bank identify you?

By the card they issued me when I opened the account.

But how did they authenticate your identity when you opened the account? I'd not trying to be an arse - but at some point it will likely have come back to matching some official photo id against your face.

They once identify you from your driver’s license, government id card or passport. After that you for example link your smart phone to you, and you use their app when you identify.

You can also use mobile carriers, they send a push notification directly to you phone+sim. Not sure what protocol they use here, because it opens up an UI which is plain android, and asks pin.

Everything relays on chain of trust that since one service has identified you, the next can trust too. Plus there is MFA to verify that you actually made the identification request.