... which is so hard to break when you have public services now dependent on fines revenue from people making honest mistakes 😔

But this has been the case since at least the 1990s. It's hard to imagine a significantly better digital service without first pulling apart that assumption and the incentives to maintain it.

With train travel specifically, we're assumed to be fare-dodging criminals until we prove otherwise. Most people can show a ticket so that's fine. If somehow I got the wrong ticket, my railcard won't load, or I accidentally joined the wrong train: guilty.

I was really bad at it until at least my early 30s. I decided it was important to me to do better so I learned through reading and watching other speakers, practiced what I'd learned, learned more, practiced more... and now I even enjoy it. (Feedback from audiences is usually pretty good, too.)

even where good MFA is available, some apps will hassle endlessly to provide a phone number as backup. I've weeded out as many as I can, but it feels endless.

I'm also wondering how a generation who've lived online our whole adult lives will keep up with this shit when we get properly into old age.

This thread is really helpful, and highlights how hard some of this is. E.g. phones which have FaceID but not fingerprint. Finger smudges make PIN codes vulnerable. Some online accounts only have 2FA via SMS or email, or worse, send to both at the same time for double the risk.

+1 for 17Track. It's not fancy, but it works. (Except for Royal Mail just lately, but they seem to have some kind of ongoing API nasties which affect their own app as well.)

Totally. I've switched a couple of accounts purely on this basis.