Check If You're Alive With a Text Message

andrewm_za writes "South Africa's Department of Home Affairs now encourages citizens to check whether they're deceased, online or by SMS, "to ensure that they have not been fraudulently declared dead on the population register. In an event that a person is registered as Deceased when still alive, they must report with an affidavit from a police station confirming that they are alive." This lack of confidence in their database comes a few years after the online marital status checker which came about after too many people were married to the wrong spouse. Both online checks sorely lack a Turing test."

Comments

makes sense

[story645]

South Africa is one of those countries where way more people have cell phones than computers, so having users validate a database by text is actually a really solid idea. ('specially since it seems like this db has been wildly inaccurate before.)

Re:makes sense

[tech_freak'n_stuff]

yeah, real down -- take'in the info super way one geek at a time--

Re:makes sense

[dgatwood]

Seems like it would be more useful for people to query the database about other people in certain other African countries... which you would send about ten seconds after you get this message:

Hello, you may find this letter surprising as we have not met yet. My name is [name], and I am the executor of the estate of [name], the exiled Prime Minister of [country]. I have in my bank's possession the sum of one million ($1,000,000) USD dollars, but we cannot transfer it to the family because it would be confiscated....