A photo of your passport and a selfie. That is what most companies call proof you are you.

A normal sign up today is a photo of your passport, a selfie, a name and date of birth checked against a database, and sometimes a utility bill.

Ever one of those has hole in it. The photo is a picture of a picture, so it could be a real passport held by the wrong person. The selfie proves someone real is sitting there, not that they own the passport. The database check only proves the details exist somewhere, which anyone with a leaked list can manage. The utility bill is a PDF that takes five minutes to edit.

What we keep going round in circles on is whether the real difference is the technology at all. A government digital ID is a government saying this is definitely that person. A photo of an ID is a company saying we are fairly confident it probably is. Those feel like two different kinds of promise.

Which part of that list do you think falls over first?