Do you have the link?
I believe that was only for the new ID for Taiwanese citizens, or at least that was all I could find in the news.
This article specifically mentions citizens ID cards (replacing paper ID cards with eID cards)
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interesting, because target rollout for ARC # change was also for October 2020 (same as that eID card above)
I saw an article where someone had an ID number A123456789. It caused him all kinds of pain because that number has been involved in so many identity theft that he couldn’t even get a cell phone contract since his credit is basically gone to crap. Then there are even people who used that number to buy railway tickets as a joke and only realized that it was a real ID number. The person actually got arrested for it and the prosecutor dropped the charge because the person didn’t mean to steal that identity.
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Any final decision about the new ID number format for foreigners?
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A contrarian engineering prof at NCKU thinks the new ID cards are a terrible idea. This report from Taiwan News explains why:
Guy
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Does it? Maybe my reading skills are getting worse, but all I see is someone saying “Hackable!!!1111!einself!”, but I saw no details what aspect this guy is worried about.
Edit: I feel very likely it’s indeed Hackable and maybe a bad idea, just out of past experience with Taiwan. But I didn’t see anything concrete there.
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I don’t think your readings skills are a problem. That is indeed the contrarian professor’s main point. : )
Guy
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Hmmm… Does anyone have any details?
Is it such a trivially Hackable system like Easy Card (one bored engineer on a trip to Taiwan easily modified the value of his easy card)?
Maybe it’s hackable just on the sole base of being thought up, created and implemented in Taiwan with at least one person involved go like “cha bu duo hai ke yi”
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The entire Taipei hukou database showed up for sale on the dark web, so what’s not hackable?
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There is a new section (Chinese only for now) on the immigration website discussing this:
https://www.immigration.gov.tw/5385/7445/238440/
It includes such gems as " After switching to a new system, can migrants apply for mobile phone numbers and renew contracts online?
The mobile broadband operators do not provide services for migrants to use the Internet to apply online."
and confirms the plan is to just change the second English letter to 8 or 9.
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Nationals without household registration and Alien Residents had different second letters.
NWOHR must be also getting a change.
6 and 7?
Yes, change to recognising it in the third digit.
- 1st digit: geographic letter code as normal (A=taipei, …)
- 2nd digit: male(8)/female(9)
- 3rd digit: 0-6 for foreign nationals or stateless, 7 for NWOHR, 8 for HK, 9 for mainland
Why not make second digit 1 and 2 then if you can tell all other stuff from the 3rd digit?
Edit: Never mind. They then can’t tell it apart from Taiwanese.
So basically they changed the third digit from being random to a specific value. Now the ID number contains even more information about alien residents depending how they encode the third number.
Taiwanese ID still get a random number as third character.
Now they need to enforce that the second number is not only checked for being 1 or 2.
But this is a chance for getting it right this time. Hopefully.
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Pointless waste of time. But I guess they needed a make work project and there you have it. Changing a ID card to be as useless as the one before it.
And why phone carriers don’t let us get the same deals as locals is beyond me. Online deals usually are one year but when we are forced to go in store usually the deal is worse and it’s a two year contract.
- I just went through the changes in that site linked and it looks to be a right royal PITA as pretty much every account and company we do business with needs the new number. Gonna take quite a few (wo)man hours to get all that sorted.
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Considering that some permanent foreigners are not in the country, in order to avoid affecting the rights and interests of the people, the planned number change period is 10 years. The old serial number will cease to be used on January 1, 2031.
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…in which “120” presumably refers to 2031?
While we’re at it, how about straightening out the double year scheme too? : D
Guy
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Agreed. It’s SO infantile.