Foreigner Friendly?
Every Taiwanese has a National ID Card 身分證 with its own unique number, not unlike a Social Security number in the US. The difference is that every legal permanent resident in the US also has a Social Security number, but foreigners living legally in Taiwan are given a different number. Instead of a National ID Card number we are given an Alien Resident Certificate 居留證 number.
This wouldn’t be a problem, except that a large number of Taiwan’s online services require a National ID Card number in order to use the site, and offer no alternative for resident aliens. Foreigners are essentially banned from using such sites. Some sites, like the National Railway Administration allow you to use your passport number, but only if you use a crappy English language alternative website.
I am going to use this post to slowly compile a list of such websites. If you encounter a Taiwanese website which is not foreigner friendly, please post it to the comments and please make clear whether the site offers an inferior English language only website (English only) or bans foreigners from registering altogether (foreigners not allowed).
- National Railway Administration - English only.
- Ruten (Taiwanese eBay) - Foreigners not allowed.
- PC Home Shopping - Foreigners not allowed.
- Books.com.tw - Can only register with passport # using a non-Taiwan address, but can change later.
- Taipei Medical University Hospital - Can only register with a Taiwanese ID Card number or existing patient number, so first time patients must go to the Hospital.
- Hola - Foreigners not allowed.
- EZfly - Foreigners can register with a passport number, but when you checkout it will give you an error message unless you clear the autofill and leave the ID number field blank.
This is just a start, please help add more sites. Eventually we may need additional categories, like sites which only work with Chinese Windows, or sites which don’t allow you to enter non-Chinese names, etc. but I’m keeping it simple for now.
{Accessiblity, Web Design, Forms, ID, 台灣}
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Comments
This is so sad to hear…
I somehow believed that once I left Korea next May and headed for Taipei for the summer I would no longer suffer, as I have been in Korea, being completely locked out of every online bookstore, movie ticket service, train ticket registration service and any other online service which seems to think that only Korean citizens would want to use it. It looks like I’ll have a similar trouble in Taiwan…
The registration thing really strikes me as having a lot to do with the old-fashioned authoritarian legacy of Japanese colonialism + decades of military rule. In the UK your ID number for signing up to websites is essentially your credit/debit card number. Although of course our freedom-loving government wants to do something about that as soon as it can by bringing in a vast and massively expensive ID database which may well find its way into our online lives.
From what I hear, one common way around the ID problem in Korea, much used by rich business wanting to remain anonymous, is to buy numbers from homeless people. Perhaps this is possible in Taiwan too… not that I’m encouraging anything so immoral/illegal.
It is interesting that the last two comments left here are both by Korea-specialists. It sounds like the situation is much worse in Korea than in Taiwan. Although I have only recently started trying to use more online shopping services in Taiwan, my sense is that such issues are largely a matter of incompetence on the part of the web designers because there are many services which don’t require these ID numbers. In fact, if the problem was more wide spread I probably wouldn’t be trying to compile a list of sites which require these numbers…
More recently I’ve encountered an increasingly number of US sites which block users using non-US IP addresses. One can usually get around this with a proxy, but it would be nice if the world really was flat …
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
What a good idea! I had figured out the books.com.tw work-around with some effort, but the railway site still irks me. There are others that escape my memory, but if I think of them, I’ll comment again. Meanwhile, I’m sure a request on Forumosa would generate a few responses!