It doesn't have to be this way. What Stripe (and others) are doing is a compromise, specifically compromising integrity and privacy of individuals, or as we like to call them, users.

There are ways to securely address the problems Stripe Identity is solving for that don't involve a single centralized honeypot that both collect and retain all identification documents, build profiles of individuals, and handles authentication and attestation. These should be broken up.

A company like Stripe sets and maintains norms. They have the means to work towards something better, instead of bidding up on the status quo with a blackbox moated vertical integration where market capture wins over everything else. If we don't get either industry cross-collaboration on open federated standards and networks, the only option will be strong government regulation enforcing well-intended but poorly executed alternatives.

There are a lot of existing work on more open protocols, federated standards, and whatnot. All of that is being ignored, and nothing else is proposed as an alternative.

Both companies (Stripe Identity's customer base) and individuals deserve better.

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Anecdote:

I apologize if I am more verbose than I would have been if I hadn't just spent most of the past 5h in a Kafkaesque series of phone calls with Paypal. Replace Paypal payments with Stripe Identity in the following and tell me I'm exaggerating when I say that this is a danger to society:

I was trying to do a single webshop purchase where the vendor only had Paypal integrated as an option. Something (supposedly with my IP/browser) made them require registering an account to proceed, which required phone verification in the country of my credit card. Account immediately got flagged and completely locked before the purchase was completed, everything got changed to the language of my credit card country (which I don't speak or read) and they told me to call Paypal support in that country, on a given number. I called and despite speaking great English, they were unable to help me in English, and told me I had to call the NA support instead. The robot voice on the other end asked what I wanted and after a couple of honest attempts, I tried with "live agent". At first it seemed like there was no way to get to a real person instead of the robot. It demanded me to verify the credit card associated with the number I was calling from - a Skype number that is not on any account of mine. I persisted in saying only "live agent" as an answer whatever the question as the voice persisted in its demands for information, until after 6~8 I was actually patched through.

I was after that escalated/sent around 5 different times, each agent taking a good time to repeat the same conversation from the beginning, making me repeat each line of information they had and a fresh round of either of SMS or e-mail validation. The final agent stayed with me for the last couple of hours as we went through everything in detail. They guided me through another e-mail validation, a password change, each step involving a browser taking painfully long time due to extended reCaptchas at every step. At some point it seemed like it would just not work as there was an infinite loop of reCaptcha and login form. The agent refused to proceed as apparently this was the only way to verify my e-mail address. All this as I was actually still logged into the blocked account and clicking links in e-mails. Trying from another device and network connection, that loop finally got broken. Eventually it came to that I had the option of an "appeal process", involving me uploading a photo ID. I said I was not comfortable doing that. My only option then was to close my account. Which requires providing a photo ID. At this point I was very frustrated and told the agent that as a resident of the EU, I would like to request data deletion. After arguing a bit about that, it turned out that there was another way to close the account, but it involved another appeal process. The agent told me that should take about 3-5 business days. After the call I received an e-mail saying account closure had been initiated but will take a minimum of 180 days to complete.

As for the purchase, the same agent actually stayed with me on the line as we tried from the beginning to do a "guest checkout", which is what I had been attempting to do from the beginning. It took a bit of back and forth until the conclusion was "it usually works but computer says no and I can't tell you why".