This is from over a year ago. Is it still the case?
I'm an American with a BofA credit card living in Taiwan right now. I would expect that to trigger a check for this. But I signed up yesterday and haven't had to verify anything.
Also, it's worth noting that the process of ID verification is not uncommon for hosting companies. FDCServers is a big hosting company that requires all new accounts to provide ID verification. Of course you're free to blur out sensitive details, and they let you send the images directly to them instead of uploading to imgur, but it's a practice nonetheless.
In businesses with high fraud rates (like hosting), it's a good idea to require customers who are creating an account from an IP address more than 100+ miles from their billing zip code to provide ID. It will reduce your chargeback rate.
As others have pointed out, this question is from a year ago. To be clear, DigitalOcean does not ask anyone to upload scans of their IDs to imgur.
We do occasionally ask customers who have set off our abuse filters to verify their accounts by emailing us scans of their ID. We agree that asking anyone for ID isn't an ideal situation, but unfortunately we deal with a large amount of abusive and fraudulent signups.
Old question, probably a bad suggestion by the rep. Might have been handled internally and there is now training not to repeat. We use DigitalOcean and love em. Not perfect, but pretty good.
Why is it bullshit? Requiring your customers to upload sensitive documents to Imgur is a pretty ridiculous practice. Seeing as Digitalocean gets so much love from HN, this seems like a good place to talk about it.
That said, as I mentioned in my previous comment, this is from over a year ago so let's see if it's still the case.
I disagree--I am glad to see it. I've considered moving to DO in the past and if that's a seriously held policy by the company I will very much refrain.
If you think it's bullshit, then flag it and move on.
I'm an American with a BofA credit card living in Taiwan right now. I would expect that to trigger a check for this. But I signed up yesterday and haven't had to verify anything.
Also, it's worth noting that the process of ID verification is not uncommon for hosting companies. FDCServers is a big hosting company that requires all new accounts to provide ID verification. Of course you're free to blur out sensitive details, and they let you send the images directly to them instead of uploading to imgur, but it's a practice nonetheless.
In businesses with high fraud rates (like hosting), it's a good idea to require customers who are creating an account from an IP address more than 100+ miles from their billing zip code to provide ID. It will reduce your chargeback rate.