ID.me Makes Inroads With US Military Community

ID.me is highlighting its role as an identity service provider for the US military community. The company is reporting that 12.5 million current and former members of the military have now registered with the platform, and are using it to gain access to a range of services that are offered to US veterans.

ID.me has been working with the military since 2013, when the NIST called upon the company to help members of the military community gain access to a range of benefits and online services. The NIST specifically signed a cooperative agreement with ID.me, in the hopes that the company could enable strong identity verification while minimizing the amount of personal information that needs to be shared with third parties.

According to ID.me Co-founder and CEO Blake Hall (himself an Army Veteran), that gives Veterans more control over their personal data, and represents a massive improvement over the old system. In that regard, he noted that Veterans would often have to expose extremely sensitive personal data to gain access to relatively trivial rewards for service.

“I found it shocking that Veterans were often showing their DD-214, and with it their SSN, to a stranger to get military benefits like a free appetizer on Veterans Day,” said Hall. “Before ID.me, identity verification for veterans was a fragmented, time-consuming process that increased the risk of identity theft. Today, ID.me improves the customer experience for millions of military family members who wish to access services and benefits while enhancing their privacy, too.”

The 12.5 million military users have now used their ID.me profiles to access benefits more than 253 million times. The solution can be used for logins with multiple major private and public organizations, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), AccessVA, and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). It can also be used with smaller organizations like Vet Tix, which gives veterans free tickets to various events, and Shift.org, which offers career advice.

Despite its successes, ID.me is still facing scrutiny from federal lawmakers for its relationship with the IRS. The company received ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and SOC 2 Type II certifications earlier this year.

–

July 14, 2022 – by Eric Weiss