identity-and-onboardinglisted

# Identity and onboarding ## The constraint The identifier is rented: prepaid SIMs are recycled, users carry several, and the number on the account may already belong to someone else. The authority you verify against is often a government database whose uptime you do not control and cannot escalate. The camera is poor, the light is bad, and the face in front of it is one that commercially available models have historically been worst at. The handset belongs to a household, not a person. Onboarding is where a product loses the most users, and in these markets almost every reason is upstream of anything the user did. ## Hard rules | ID | Rule | Severity | |---|---|---| | IDN-001 | Treat the phone number as a rented identifier, not as an identity. | critical | | IDN-002 | Give every identity-authority call an explicit deadline and a defined outcome at that deadline. | critical | | IDN-003 | Publish upstream authority status to the people depending on it, in real time. | critical | | IDN-004 | Evaluate biometric capture stratified by skin tone, using the Monk Skin Tone scale. | critical | | IDN-005 | Gate capture quality on the device, before anything is uploaded. | critical | | IDN-006 | Design capture for a poor camera in poor light, and say what to fix. | warning | | IDN-007 | Never assume the OTP arrived. | warning | | IDN-008 | Account recovery must not depend on one channel or one device. | warning | | IDN-009 | Do not block onboarding on a document a legitimate user m