Originally Posted by Evianon

I deferred it for long, but decided to give Airbnb a try. The concept is nice and with my increasing number of nights abroad it could reduce costs as well.

After making my first reservations (and after charging my CC..), the site requested to verify my identity by scanning my ID / passport. No problem, I do understand all is built upon trust and hotels check ID's as well anyway.

However, my ID's and and passports have all been rejected, because I blocked my social security number and document number on the scans, using the app especially provided to do so by the Dutch government.

I won't ever share my social security number with any non-government or health related institution. One of my friends has his life ruined after identity theft when a site was hacked and his passport copy including social security number was stolen. Furthermore, requests for the number by non-authorized authorities are prohibited under Dutch law.

As every random first-line Airbnb employee can view your passport copy and given they're working with a vague third party company for verification, uploading your ID to Airbnb literally exposes it to probably tens of thousands of people.

Thus, sharing the number really isn't an option and no-one should ever consider to do so. However, I can't believe there isn't some kind of workaround for this, as there must be tons of people refusing to share their social security number with Airbnb? At least in the Netherlands it's common practice to hide it on every ID scan, especially after government campaigns on the issue.

Does someone have a successful workaround for being ID verified on Airbnb without disclosing social security numbers and / or document numbers?

There are existing topics on Airbnb verification already, but as my issue is specifically with sharing social security and document numbers, I opened a new one.