Critical to the story, he wasn’t an employee. He’s a rideshare driver, and therefore an independent contractor. That gave him the flexibility to just stop accepting rides for years, but it also meant he had no legal job protection or internal avenue of recourse when his account got banned, likely for suspicion it had been stolen to be used for someone who otherwise would not be accepted as a driver.

Reminds me of the people that travel for plastic surgery and need to take special precautions to get back through customs.

It's an interesting story as some people see facial biometrics (with increasing fidelity) as an escape from document verification deepfaking threats.

But people's biometrics really can change over time, and I don't think there's a clean way out. Back to expensive and inconvenient in-person checks?

As an aside, he lost 200 lbs over 2 years, so about 8 lbs a month.

Thats on the aggressive side of a healthy weight loss pace, so kudos to him for not just losing the weight but apparently doing it healthily over an extended period of time instead of trying to rush it.

Interesting. Rather than run an in-house verification team, you allow for a third party (Howard Finkelstein's Help Me Howard) to do the "this is not just a scam; it's worth escalating" and then trust them. Howard benefits by getting to do a bit and you get to cut verification costs. A non-monetary payment works here where financial reward would result in capturing a significant portion of the surplus from both the banned driver and the employer. Definitely interesting.

I thought this would be about Gabe Newell https://reddit.com/r/valve/comments/1vt6iqe/new_chad_gabe_lo...

I guess the point of the article is the difficulty he had getting back to his job, but man... good for that dude for losing that much weight. It's genuinely super hard to make the changes needed for that, good on him.