I have identical twin boys - when signing up for a bank account app and while completing all the associated hoops for ID, the second to do it got the rather dystopian error message 'an account has already been registered with this face'
I wonder how it's possible they didn't think about this problem. Considering everyone involved in building this feature, not a single person thought about the possibility of twins or simply people who are very alike? Also, can't people open multiple accounts?
I imagine that it probably went like this "what about identical twins?" / "Don't worry about that for now, we'll solve for it before we go live, but it's not in this milestone". Then someone pulls rank and decides the product is "good enough, we can't wait for all bugs to be fixed" and gets it deployed.
Based on my experience I assume someone mentioned the risk, others said it’s unlikely and only a small percentage, that we should care about the 99% for now. Then the issues isn’t revisited until someone impacted complains enough.
p99 is ok for web stuff, not for systems that impacts people in their life, but I’ve seen too often things being dismissed because they are edge cases (which becomes an actual real issue at the scale of a country of course)
Maybe they didn’t care. Identical twins are a fraction of a percent of the population. Excluding them (really, only half of them) from the customer base wouldn’t hurt noticeably.
What is strange is that even the best face recognition algorithms have false positive. So surely they must have planned for two unrelated customers resolving to the same embeddings.
One imagines they are far more worried about person X fraudulently claiming to be person Y than they are about occasionally causing problems for identical twins.
Obviously the solution is to accompany facial recognition with DNA tests.
I've had issues with this e-visa implementation and was told I could not board flights.
As a someone in tech, I feel this a classic case study of how NOT to roll out a release and develop a solution.
The release was chaotic, none of the airlines staff were trained on how to use this. So they still insisted on the expired cards and then picked on the expiry dates.
Next, almost everyone makes you generate a verification share code in front of them by logging into the e-visa website even if the rules say I can print it out and just use the code. It takes a few minute to get on the website and generate one.
This solution assumed that everyone has access to a smart phone and a good wifi connection to make this work.
> Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.
God this happens all the time. Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!
I’ve been in the weird situation of working in a startup where the founder doesn’t use their own product. Needless to say I got out of there pretty quick.
I write software that we use daily, and we still find things in the wild that we would never find until the thing in the wild occurs. Luckily for me, none of these found in the wild issues interfere with people's lives and just means a file gets completed a little closer to the deadline. I'm fine with that.
Not sure if this situation falls under the "push it to prod and let the users QA it" or if this is truly edge case situations. It's easy to bash and make fun of, but I've been in the trenches of catching what is an edge case for most people but run of the mill for those providing the data to me.
I bet you 100% it was built not by in house team but farmed out to an agency for £££££ millions. They will have been saying in their case studies some absolute nonsense about how they saved the government millions rather than burned loads of money too.
So did we, although we were in the end able to persuade them to let us board the flight by showing a screenshot of my friend's eVisa status from the UK government website (so secure!)
To be fair to the airlines here, if they get it wrong then the UK government fines the airline. This is why they are pretty risk averse, and also why I'm surprised that the screenshot worked.
Also for years prior it was explicitly said share code were _not_ to be used for travels and that airlines were not allowed to ask for them.
And now that they are the airlines do not have the system to check them so you have to print the webpage which also explicitly said should _not_ be used instead of the share code...
I suspect this case has origins less to do with the programming itself, and more to do with UK bureaucracy just not giving a shit, as with the post office scandal where authorities, including the legal system, blindly believing in the outsourced systems led to hundreds of false prosecutions and thirteen suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).
Why Estonia? Because the Exit/Entry System (EES) is built by the eu-LISA, an EU agency headquartered in Estonia.
Granted, they have freelancers all over Europe and data centers in Austrian and French Alps.
How do I know? I passed interviews there a few years ago, and I almost joined but by the time of signature, they slashed freelance rates well below market, claiming that this is because they now allow full-time remote work.
It'd be lovely if articles like this named the people responsible for actually building the systems. It's almost certainly never a government department.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.
Actually this was developed by the government, in a meaningful sense, but it seems like it's Entrust (more or less inevitably) and Accenture who are the outsourced parts.
So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)
All software is going to have edge cases, no matter how good the contractor is. The decision to not have contingencies to manually handle reasonable edge cases is entirely on the government.
> A Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status. ..."
So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
> Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians and their consultants know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.
I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.
It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.
The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).
Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.
So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.
How? How can a single absolute number indicate broad success? You can't read from it if failure rate is 1% (completely unacceptable) or 0.01% (probably acceptable as long as problems are quickly mitigated). Also what do they even count as a success? If someone is stranded somewhere for a month and the problem then gets mitigated, they did eventually successfully use it, didn't they?
The strongest indicator that the system is riddled with issues is in what they did not say. If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
> If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
That's a bit of a straw man though isn't it — could there ever have been as few as a hundred problems in a system of this complexity with four million users?
I am sure it has not been a flawless rollout but I don't really understand the outrage here.
Bias in media reporting is a factor here. That bias is driven in part by feelings about Brexit and about a system that exists in this form because of it.
Glad to have your obviously authoritative review of the subject, though. I am suitably chastened I am sure.
I misread a thing. Actually the system went into force at the border in February — that is when people have only been using their eVisas instead of alternative documents, it's when the border switched to using the readers.
The government did not even stop issuing physical visa stickers until the beginning of last month.
So again, this ten million figure does not seem to indicate a likelihood of massive, systemic failure.
If there has been massive failure, then I guess the government department and the two US tech multinationals (Accenture's global HQ is only in Dublin for tax purposes) will have to figure it out.
It's older than that. It started in 2018. January 2025 was when the system became eVisa only.
In this case I suspect that either there was a recent mix-up or that person hasn't travelled since she came to the UK or got settled status and never noticed the problem.
There simply cannot have been that many border crossings that failed this way — the eVisa system has only been in force without any fallback alternatives for a few months and only four million people hold them anyway.
Proportionally speaking most of the failures will surely have been non-crossing uses (electronically proving right to work/receive benefits/not have to ultimately pay/claim on insurance for non-emergency care).
I would say what we do care about is the number of people who were not able to use the system successfully through no fault of their own. Even 0.001% failure rate is too high when is affects more than a few people per year. Especially so when there is no easy way to rectify the problem.
Why do you have to ask? Because you don't have easy access to the data. Whether or not your nation has a culture of honesty, big scale communication is always going to be dumbed down.
What was the failure rate on the earlier system, the mean time to resolution, and the maximum time to resolution, and how does that compare with the current system.
To be fair, the rules are insane. There are several different ways in which you might be or become a British citizen, and there are five other kinds of British (non-citizen) nationality. Irish citizens are in a category of their own. And then there's rules for other EU citizens and per-country rules for everyone else.
Sure, the software has a bug. Software does. Almost always. What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it. You could have a software process which works 99.9% of the time, and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
Instead, we demand a 100% correct system, and save money on actually having people around who can deal with the edge cases and make sure everyone has a good time. Of course, getting a project from 99.9% to 100% costs a lot of money, because that includes literally all edge cases ever (getting to 100% is as likely as reaching ∞ by multiplying any given starting number by 2 until you reach it), and so it will likely end up being more expensive in budget overruns than the 99.9% plus humans system.
Obviously, politicians must choose for the fictional 100% case, because they can't afford the cheaper 99.9% plus human one.
I mostly agree but I think the bar for the software still has to be unusually high when the failure mode is "you are not allowed to enter the country you legally live in"... The human fallback is essential, but it shouldn't become the thing that makes a fundamentally unreliable system acceptable
Tbh, I suspect this failure mode is far less than the old mode - which is paper based and your passport goes missing in transit at the embassy (or doesn't come back in time).
Yeah the article makes it unclear but this doesn't sound like she was "stranded" for long:
> “I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said. “Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad.”
Sounds like there were indeed channels to escalate this.
Previous company had full payments/accounts team, a few QAs, a couple accountants and SRE working on the automation of a specific payment edge case that was normally handled through support, and was taking 5-10 mins to handle per case. Whole thing took four-five months.
In the first year, less than 100 people used it, out of a few million. It was B2C, so after taxes, that amount was maybe enough to cover a couple days of lunch for the people who worked on it.
This is why you need to diligently track escalations/exceptions, and add more software support as the business case to automate or streamline supports it.
Yeah, absolutely horrible situation to put people in, let bugs stay unfixed that leads people to being stranded in foreign countries with no clear resolution in hours, and on top of that neither parties seem to be interested in just fuzzing up and fixing the fucking problem.
> Monique Hawkins, the acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, said it had seen previous cases similar to Webb’s, adding that it highlighted vulnerabilities in the system and it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status”.
> She told Politico the eVisa rollout had been “rushed”, adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”
The point is, they aren't wrong. You will never get rid of all such edge cases... and even if you could, you couldn't afford to do so. The responsibility to make the larger process resilient to those types of bugs must exist somewhere, and at a higher level than engineering.
What's described here is not an engineering failure, but a process failure.
This is like a belief in karma. It's irrational, and it's completely untrue as far as anyone can tell, but we are all arguably better off by pretending that things really do work that way.
It's an engineering failure if the designers did not fight for it. In my career as an electronics engineer and later as a software developer it was clearly part of my job to interrogate the specification documents and almost always the customer to discover what the system really needed to do and what edge cases the customer had ignored, forgotten, or was simply unaware of.
Yes it's a process failure but just like health and safety it is everyone's responsibility.
You still likely need a human bypass. "I was injured or disfigured so my face no longer anything for you to compare to. I do not now, and never shall again resemble the image in the system."
Similar things happen when you require fingerprints or retinal scans. "Well, I don't have a right hand anymore. It's in some hospital's incinerator."
And not having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
> [N]ot having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
I think his point is that the designers of the software would have been aware of this, but they weren't the designers of the system, who wanted software to do All the Things.
You cite three meaningful changes in biometrics: disfigured, loss of fingerprint and retinal issues.
In all three cases surely the right and proper thing do to is to get your details updated on the system ? It may even be a legal requirement for you to do so in the case of official ID documents.
Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.
But for a permanent thing I just don't see why you would not just get stuff re-issued or updated.
If a person off on holiday just had their face burned off by one of those tabletop fire pits and is on their way home due to just getting their face burned off, something tells me the last thing on their mind is swinging by the embassy to get their biometrics updated.
Why would disfigurement be temporary? You are still injecting spin to dismiss legit concerns that are not optional for any production system. The system should always have a human override available with a manual check.
>and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
This may be possible some 15+ years ago. Home Office today is very different. Without a prober procedure written down I doubt this could be solved manually. Nor would anyone want to solve it manually.
> What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it
This is another instance of the usual hubris of management in thinking that automation has solved all the problems without creating any of its own, therefore all the humans are now made redundant.
unfortunately this has become typical in Britain, no one can be trusted to have any responsibility or agency. its all systems with room for the real world
“In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.” The Home Office indicated the problem Webb encountered had since been fixed and that staff would contact her directly.
so yes, they can and do override the system.
Also the person wasn't stuck in the airport, they were denied boarding of the plane because there was an issue with their identification documentation.
It's not good, its a travesty that you even need an ID to fly between two european countries, let alone a visa, but the picture you paint is at odds with reality.
What's really stupid is not being allowed to get on the flight at all.
Like: she's not labelled as a "terrorist", so just let her on the flight as she's not likely to make the plane explode, and let the customs folks take her as a one-off to be dealt with on home soil. Why is it necessary to be pre-approved to even get on the flight?
Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.
Under UK legislation as the owners, agents or operators of a ship or aircraft you may become liable for a charge of £2,000 for every passenger arriving in the UK without:
- a valid “immigration document” which satisfactorily establishes identity and nationality or citizenship.
- and, if the person requires a visa, a visa of the required kind or other permission to travel. This visa, or permission, may now be in either physical form, or a digital e- Visa; or
- a valid Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), if the person requires one.
Because companies can choose their customers, and can choose not to serve some customers because they are too difficult/expensive, while a government can't ethically make the same choice. A government (at least a liberal democratic and republican government of, by, and for The People) serves all their citizens, it's kinda the point, whereas a company definitely maintains types of customers they are not interested in.
This is a fundamental problem with "running government like a business," one of several that point to the fundamental flaws of the entire idea (profit motive, unitary unit of execution, etc.).
> while a government can't ethically make the same choice
I'm glad you said "ethically" because the current US administration is openly admitting that they're making decisions on things like school funding, disaster relief based on whether that state went for Trump or not.
What I don't understand is why this isn't already the case. Every single EU(and UK!) airport I've ever been to has a fallback to agents sitting at nearby gates if the eGate fails to recognize you for any reason. It just says "please proceed to agent" and you get back in the queue for families with kids and non-EU citizens etc.
It is issue of software being allowed to make a decision, instead of a suggestion, that can be easily overridden by an operator.
So this is an issue of a forced software integration, with no one being responsible for the harm, that it may cause.
What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it.
Shouldn't even be necessary, an operator ought to have possibility to override it, and this, in turn, should be put in a queue for someone else to confirm adherence to procedures later on. No reason for a delay.
The backend company many financial institutions use to verify a person’s identity has details of my life mixed up with my son’s. When I do verification I have to be mindful of this, and often have to call him to make sure I don’t fail. There is no one to call. It’ll be like this forever.
"Known issue" and "you may not board the flight home" really shouldn't appear in the same system. If a database error can effectively invalidate your legal status at the border, there needs to be a fallback that doesn't involve spending hours on the phone
Unfortunately there are more and more cases where "The computer says no" and then there is no human to talk to, and you are bounced back from one automated system to another...
I had recently a case where my title (Mr) ended up as my middle name in the system of the operating airline (it was perfectly correct in the system of the airline that I booked the ticket through). Two hours of talking to those two airlines did not help me. I had to buy another ticket...
I think this starts to remind me the movie Brazil...
> My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.
I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).
Most governments have strict rules around “photoshopping” or doctoring images, particularly for passports and other identification documents. I'm pretty sure Gemini embeds invisible SynthID watermarks into Nano-Banana images.
So just be advised that this could get you into hot water.
I am a UK citizen, born in Scotland, before 1983, to Scottish parents. We moved to Australia when I was young and I traveled on my mother's passport.
Now I live in the US.
The UK government has decided that to travel to the UK, a UK citizen MUST use a UK passport. They also, helpfully, don't offer passport services at their US embassies and consulates.
So the process is this: I begin the process on gov.uk, and validate my identity to them, to their satisfaction, using questions only I should know (where did my parents marry, born where and to whom, what time of the day). Once I have done that, I get to upload a passport photo of myself... and then I have to find, and nominate another UK citizen who -does- have a passport, -who is not related to me-, who "has known me for two years", and "has the risk of loss if they were to make a false statement", to go through the same process themselves, validate their identity, and then state that the photo they have seen is of me, that they have known me for two years or more, what the nature of our relationship is, and more.
Then the UK will issue my passport.
Fun story of the app refusals though, id.me, as used by the IRS:
"Scan the front and back of your Driver's License."
[upload scan of front of DL @ 200DPI]
"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of front of DL @ 300DPI]
"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."
Huh. Maybe I'll try with a lower resolution.
[upload scan of front of DL @ 72DPI]
"Thank you, now please upload the back of your Driver's License."
Hmm, 72DPI worked for the front, so...
[upload scan of back of DL @ 72DPI]
"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of back of DL @ 200DPI]
"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."
The terrible part to me is them saying "the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours", this should be like a 15-minute delay at most when you can present your passport with its number which also matches your biometrics (as would be the case with twins).
I myself recently had a 10-minute or so delay due to a visa issue. I was departing from Johannesburg and was going to use my Italian passport for entry into New Zealand. I had acquired an NZeTA visa about 15 months before but didn't think to consider until checking in that it was against my previous passport number which I had since renewed.
When the agent said they were just having to double check my visa (while my wife's and children' were fine), the fact the passport had been renewed occurred to me and I told the agent about it which probably saved a couple of minutes of them having to work out this was the issue. They phoned New Zealand, explained the situation and within about 10 minutes the New Zealand side updated their system and I was able to complete my check-in.
The problem is there used to be a separate physical card (BRP), but the Home Office got rid of it and moved to this all digital system. In other words there is no backup method available to ground staff.
This sounds like a mistake or a confused support agent. The system lacks a notion of twins - it doesn't link accounts via biometrics. The names are similar but not equal and the passport numbers would also be different.
Perhaps they used the same email when registering by mistake?
Not sure if related, but the Spanish security kiosks are shockingly bad they had great difficulty reading faces, fingerprints, and even passports when held perfectly flat on their reading glass.
“Webb said Home Office staff promised her over the phone the problem would be fixed, though a confirmation email was then sent to her sister instead of to her.”
I've seen more and more instances of this. Sometimes it's a feature in disguise - humans are easier to spoof than software - but mostly it's laziness or cost cutting.
For example, I went to the bank down the road and tried to withdraw a few thousand dollars. This isn't atypical for me - I do this every few months. I had my ID and knew my account number, but I didn't have my debit card. They essentially told me "system says no" and that there wasn't anything they could do. This is a feature for the bank - a human teller might be talked into pressing the wrong button by fraud. Instead, I had to go home and get my debit card. By presenting that bit of plastic, system said yes, and I was good to go with my cash.
For another example, I was recently at an airport listening to a family struggling to get on a flight. They were checked in with seats assigned (confirmed by the gate agent) but the system refused to give the green "ok to board" light for them. Rather than just put them on the flight and file a ticket to fix the record after the fact, the agent just stood there churning for a while until a supervisor was able to sprint over from the other end of the airport. The supervisor didn't use their superior access level to overwrite the broken system. Instead, they used their superior knowledge on how to push the system through its bug. They kicked the family off the flight, unassigned their seats, put them on standby, approved them for (random) empty seats, and then let them board... but now they weren't sitting together in the seats they had before. I ended up missing that (extremely delayed) flight for boring reasons related to ongoing engine problems and upcoming connections so I don't know how it worked out but I hope they got to sit together in the end!
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] threadp99 is ok for web stuff, not for systems that impacts people in their life, but I’ve seen too often things being dismissed because they are edge cases (which becomes an actual real issue at the scale of a country of course)
Obviously the solution is to accompany facial recognition with DNA tests.
As a someone in tech, I feel this a classic case study of how NOT to roll out a release and develop a solution.
The release was chaotic, none of the airlines staff were trained on how to use this. So they still insisted on the expired cards and then picked on the expiry dates.
Next, almost everyone makes you generate a verification share code in front of them by logging into the e-visa website even if the rules say I can print it out and just use the code. It takes a few minute to get on the website and generate one.
This solution assumed that everyone has access to a smart phone and a good wifi connection to make this work.
Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.
God this happens all the time. Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!
Not sure if this situation falls under the "push it to prod and let the users QA it" or if this is truly edge case situations. It's easy to bash and make fun of, but I've been in the trenches of catching what is an edge case for most people but run of the mill for those providing the data to me.
To be fair to the airlines here, if they get it wrong then the UK government fines the airline. This is why they are pretty risk averse, and also why I'm surprised that the screenshot worked.
And now that they are the airlines do not have the system to check them so you have to print the webpage which also explicitly said should _not_ be used instead of the share code...
Computer says no.
https://spectator.com/article/the-british-dream-by-david-goo...
Why Estonia? Because the Exit/Entry System (EES) is built by the eu-LISA, an EU agency headquartered in Estonia.
Granted, they have freelancers all over Europe and data centers in Austrian and French Alps.
How do I know? I passed interviews there a few years ago, and I almost joined but by the time of signature, they slashed freelance rates well below market, claiming that this is because they now allow full-time remote work.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.
So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)
So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians and their consultants know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.
I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.
It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.
The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).
Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.
So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.
The strongest indicator that the system is riddled with issues is in what they did not say. If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.
That's a bit of a straw man though isn't it — could there ever have been as few as a hundred problems in a system of this complexity with four million users?
I am sure it has not been a flawless rollout but I don't really understand the outrage here.
Glad to have your obviously authoritative review of the subject, though. I am suitably chastened I am sure.
The government did not even stop issuing physical visa stickers until the beginning of last month.
So again, this ten million figure does not seem to indicate a likelihood of massive, systemic failure.
If there has been massive failure, then I guess the government department and the two US tech multinationals (Accenture's global HQ is only in Dublin for tax purposes) will have to figure it out.
In this case I suspect that either there was a recent mix-up or that person hasn't travelled since she came to the UK or got settled status and never noticed the problem.
Proportionally speaking most of the failures will surely have been non-crossing uses (electronically proving right to work/receive benefits/not have to ultimately pay/claim on insurance for non-emergency care).
Jokes aside, when helping someone I know return to the UK, I wasn't sure if I have a stroke or someone who wrote the guidance had a lobotomy.
Clear as mud.
Sure, the software has a bug. Software does. Almost always. What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it. You could have a software process which works 99.9% of the time, and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.
Instead, we demand a 100% correct system, and save money on actually having people around who can deal with the edge cases and make sure everyone has a good time. Of course, getting a project from 99.9% to 100% costs a lot of money, because that includes literally all edge cases ever (getting to 100% is as likely as reaching ∞ by multiplying any given starting number by 2 until you reach it), and so it will likely end up being more expensive in budget overruns than the 99.9% plus humans system.
Obviously, politicians must choose for the fictional 100% case, because they can't afford the cheaper 99.9% plus human one.
> “I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said. “Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad.”
Sounds like there were indeed channels to escalate this.
Previous company had full payments/accounts team, a few QAs, a couple accountants and SRE working on the automation of a specific payment edge case that was normally handled through support, and was taking 5-10 mins to handle per case. Whole thing took four-five months.
In the first year, less than 100 people used it, out of a few million. It was B2C, so after taxes, that amount was maybe enough to cover a couple days of lunch for the people who worked on it.
> Monique Hawkins, the acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, said it had seen previous cases similar to Webb’s, adding that it highlighted vulnerabilities in the system and it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status”.
> She told Politico the eVisa rollout had been “rushed”, adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”
"Oh, that's an edge case. 0.1% of users will encounter it. P2 bug, not a ship blocker."
What's described here is not an engineering failure, but a process failure.
Yes it's a process failure but just like health and safety it is everyone's responsibility.
Similar things happen when you require fingerprints or retinal scans. "Well, I don't have a right hand anymore. It's in some hospital's incinerator."
And not having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.
I think his point is that the designers of the software would have been aware of this, but they weren't the designers of the system, who wanted software to do All the Things.
You cite three meaningful changes in biometrics: disfigured, loss of fingerprint and retinal issues.
In all three cases surely the right and proper thing do to is to get your details updated on the system ? It may even be a legal requirement for you to do so in the case of official ID documents.
Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.
But for a permanent thing I just don't see why you would not just get stuff re-issued or updated.
The real world is messy.
I suggest you actually read my post, because its clear you did not.
If you had read it, you would have seen the phrase "Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.".
I quite clearly excluded holiday injury.
This may be possible some 15+ years ago. Home Office today is very different. Without a prober procedure written down I doubt this could be solved manually. Nor would anyone want to solve it manually.
This is another instance of the usual hubris of management in thinking that automation has solved all the problems without creating any of its own, therefore all the humans are now made redundant.
The vision that it evokes is terrifying!
so yes, they can and do override the system.
Also the person wasn't stuck in the airport, they were denied boarding of the plane because there was an issue with their identification documentation.
It's not good, its a travesty that you even need an ID to fly between two european countries, let alone a visa, but the picture you paint is at odds with reality.
What's really stupid is not being allowed to get on the flight at all.
Like: she's not labelled as a "terrorist", so just let her on the flight as she's not likely to make the plane explode, and let the customs folks take her as a one-off to be dealt with on home soil. Why is it necessary to be pre-approved to even get on the flight?
- a valid “immigration document” which satisfactorily establishes identity and nationality or citizenship.
- and, if the person requires a visa, a visa of the required kind or other permission to travel. This visa, or permission, may now be in either physical form, or a digital e- Visa; or
- a valid Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), if the person requires one.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/document-checks-a...
I don't think it is good enough for either, but I also think we should practice, and run our companies, as we preach.
This is a fundamental problem with "running government like a business," one of several that point to the fundamental flaws of the entire idea (profit motive, unitary unit of execution, etc.).
I'm glad you said "ethically" because the current US administration is openly admitting that they're making decisions on things like school funding, disaster relief based on whether that state went for Trump or not.
Why can't the same system work here?
I seem to recall a time when you could ring up, get through to a human that could actually solve your problem.
Now humans are just front ends for software, and there's noone to take responsibility.
I would put the blame more of systems and cost saving. They don't want humans to have any responsibility, or pay them for that.
So this is an issue of a forced software integration, with no one being responsible for the harm, that it may cause.
Shouldn't even be necessary, an operator ought to have possibility to override it, and this, in turn, should be put in a queue for someone else to confirm adherence to procedures later on. No reason for a delay.I had recently a case where my title (Mr) ended up as my middle name in the system of the operating airline (it was perfectly correct in the system of the airline that I booked the ticket through). Two hours of talking to those two airlines did not help me. I had to buy another ticket...
I think this starts to remind me the movie Brazil...
I was losing my sanity over all the refusals (app refusing the photos).
I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).
The hilarity of having to compare a baby picture with a 5 year old kid stood in front of you is a separate problem.
> The hilarity of having to compare a baby picture with a 5 year old kid stood in front of you is a separate problem.
Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous, I'd imagine that most border guards will just check the last name and assume it's OK in that case.
So just be advised that this could get you into hot water.
Now I live in the US.
The UK government has decided that to travel to the UK, a UK citizen MUST use a UK passport. They also, helpfully, don't offer passport services at their US embassies and consulates.
So the process is this: I begin the process on gov.uk, and validate my identity to them, to their satisfaction, using questions only I should know (where did my parents marry, born where and to whom, what time of the day). Once I have done that, I get to upload a passport photo of myself... and then I have to find, and nominate another UK citizen who -does- have a passport, -who is not related to me-, who "has known me for two years", and "has the risk of loss if they were to make a false statement", to go through the same process themselves, validate their identity, and then state that the photo they have seen is of me, that they have known me for two years or more, what the nature of our relationship is, and more.
Then the UK will issue my passport.
Fun story of the app refusals though, id.me, as used by the IRS:
"Scan the front and back of your Driver's License."
[upload scan of front of DL @ 200DPI]
"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of front of DL @ 300DPI]
"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."
Huh. Maybe I'll try with a lower resolution.
[upload scan of front of DL @ 72DPI]
"Thank you, now please upload the back of your Driver's License."
Hmm, 72DPI worked for the front, so...
[upload scan of back of DL @ 72DPI]
"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of back of DL @ 200DPI]
"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of back of DL @ 300DPI]
"Thank you for verifying your Driver's License".
I myself recently had a 10-minute or so delay due to a visa issue. I was departing from Johannesburg and was going to use my Italian passport for entry into New Zealand. I had acquired an NZeTA visa about 15 months before but didn't think to consider until checking in that it was against my previous passport number which I had since renewed.
When the agent said they were just having to double check my visa (while my wife's and children' were fine), the fact the passport had been renewed occurred to me and I told the agent about it which probably saved a couple of minutes of them having to work out this was the issue. They phoned New Zealand, explained the situation and within about 10 minutes the New Zealand side updated their system and I was able to complete my check-in.
Laws against persona; freedoms should be called out as unethical.
Comedy gold.
For example, I went to the bank down the road and tried to withdraw a few thousand dollars. This isn't atypical for me - I do this every few months. I had my ID and knew my account number, but I didn't have my debit card. They essentially told me "system says no" and that there wasn't anything they could do. This is a feature for the bank - a human teller might be talked into pressing the wrong button by fraud. Instead, I had to go home and get my debit card. By presenting that bit of plastic, system said yes, and I was good to go with my cash.
For another example, I was recently at an airport listening to a family struggling to get on a flight. They were checked in with seats assigned (confirmed by the gate agent) but the system refused to give the green "ok to board" light for them. Rather than just put them on the flight and file a ticket to fix the record after the fact, the agent just stood there churning for a while until a supervisor was able to sprint over from the other end of the airport. The supervisor didn't use their superior access level to overwrite the broken system. Instead, they used their superior knowledge on how to push the system through its bug. They kicked the family off the flight, unassigned their seats, put them on standby, approved them for (random) empty seats, and then let them board... but now they weren't sitting together in the seats they had before. I ended up missing that (extremely delayed) flight for boring reasons related to ongoing engine problems and upcoming connections so I don't know how it worked out but I hope they got to sit together in the end!
On whose dime?
"We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation,"
Oh.