Spy Games, page 143, the little black box on the lower right, details a lot of what's in a fake SIN based on the rating. It's really good, unless SR5 has something completely different.

The rating of your fake SIN determines which of your "biometrics" actually match you.
A rating 1 fake SIN is so poor anyone who bothers to check your SIN will likely notice that you are NOT a 57 year old female troll from Amazonia. A rating 6 SIN matches you so well that they can match it to you under even the closest scrutiny.
If your real biometrics matched your fake SIN, like your DNA, etc, it seems that owning a rating 6 fake SIN would be almost as bad as having your DNA, fingerprints, retina prints, and more already on file...

Thoughts?

I thought devil rat on a stick was on the ¥1 menu?

The following are used as performance metrics for biometric systems: (Wiki cut)

• false acceptance rate or false match rate (FAR or FMR): the probability that the system incorrectly matches the input pattern to a non-matching template in the database. It measures the percent of invalid inputs which are incorrectly accepted. In case of similarity scale, if the person is imposter in real, but the matching score is higher than the threshold, then he is treated as genuine that increase the FAR and hence performance also depends upon the selection of threshold value.[7]
• false rejection rate or false non-match rate (FRR or FNMR): the probability that the system fails to detect a match between the input pattern and a matching template in the database. It measures the percent of valid inputs which are incorrectly rejected.
• receiver operating characteristic or relative operating characteristic (ROC): The ROC plot is a visual characterization of the trade-off between the FAR and the FRR. In general, the matching algorithm performs a decision based on a threshold which determines how close to a template the input needs to be for it to be considered a match. If the threshold is reduced, there will be fewer false non-matches but more false accepts. Correspondingly, a higher threshold will reduce the FAR but increase the FRR. A common variation is the Detection error trade-off (DET), which is obtained using normal deviate scales on both axes. This more linear graph illuminates the differences for higher performances (rarer errors).
• equal error rate or crossover error rate (EER or CER): the rate at which both accept and reject errors are equal. The value of the EER can be easily obtained from the ROC curve. The EER is a quick way to compare the accuracy of devices with different ROC curves. In general, the device with the lowest EER is most accurate.
• failure to enroll rate (FTE or FER): the rate at which attempts to create a template from an input is unsuccessful. This is most commonly caused by low quality inputs.
• failure to capture rate (FTC): Within automatic systems, the probability that the system fails to detect a biometric input when presented correctly.
• template capacity: the maximum number of sets of data which can be stored in the system.

So I figure fake IDers exploit a 'universal' characteristic of ROC. In our games we metagamed it to say that hey, the guys making the matching systems (big corps, govs, etc) Want the system to be open enough that THEY can exploit it with fake stuff, but good enough that the sheep think its hyper-accurate. Which then leaves it open for high end criminal factions/etc to exploit it too.

Devil rat on a stick is only available from stands in the orc underground Mchughs is all soy baby!

Not completely, but nevertheless significantly:

1. Random anybody, age, nationality, and sex may not match; no supporting data
2. Rough match; sex matches, age and nationality “pretty close,” no supporting data
3. Good match; sex, age, and nationality match; supporting data, but obviously fake
4. Casually plausible; sex, age, and nationality match; supporting data appears valid only on cursory checks
5. Good fit; all statistics match; valid biometrics for another person (with samples); some supporting data and history)
6. Alternate life; all statistics match; valid biometrics with samples; complete and entirely believable history

There also is a list for SIN checks, what a scanner with a given rating checks for more or less mirrors what a SIN of the same rating offers. For example R 1 just asks "do you have a SIN?", R 3 checks if any supporting data is in the registry, R 4 checks whether that data roughly matches...

My take on SINs and stop and searches is that the police use it as an excuse to keep the riff-raff moving along. Cops in the world today don't stop to fuss with every panhandler even in metropolitan downtowns. Granted if you are trying to walk into a corporate area the guards will have something different to say, but in public, who is going to pay the police to harass every single person who moves through the area? Just think about how many people and how much of a hassle it is to get through an airport security line. You will put up with that in an airport, and maybe in the future you will put up with that to enter and exit a shopping center...but probably not. Most of the surveilance is going to be automated anyway, so if someone has slouched their way out of the Barrens the system will grab a picture of them, maybe the system will watch on multiple feeds and run some algorithms to deem the person "unsafe" or give a general layout of their movement patterns through the area, so when Lone Star does have to run them down, they can find them easily.

But what is the point of paying people to harass a potentially paying customer? Sure, if we are in the equivalent of Times Square or Ginza or whatever the area will have a "no smelly orks" policy to keep their prestige from being smudged. But in a B or a C zone? It just doesn't make sense.

Countries like Japan already offer an extensive alternative to actual money: chargable money cards. Seriously, you just give some random name and address and voila, you get a card that is usable in most trains, convenience stores, taxis and hotels. You can feasible live off those things even now, and it would just take a bit more tweaking to make it more ubiquitous. How do you pay a SINless person? Okay, you worked for me scrubbing windows for a day? Here is 100 nuyen on your NeoPaypal, now get your smelly ass back to Redmond.

I predict there will be a thriving market for those intermediate currencies, if for nothing else but to provide a safe place to launder money with the benefit of giving the lower-than-wageslave SINless some way to live other than barter. Labor laws will be relaxed so that you can legally pay people under the table through a SINless worker fund of some kind and not have to keep any records on whether or not you actually paid the poor bastards, or if you gave them real currency or not. But look at how the US abuses illegal workers to its own profit. Who is gonna wipe the toilets in the future? Johnny Renraku, born with a silver SIN and a credstick in his ass? Is a corp gonna turn down dirt-cheap labor just because the person isn't in the system? They certainly are happy to pick up shadowrunners...

To the people who were born into the system, or managed to claw their way in, the world is a glittering, safe, happy place where the color in your simsense is bright and crisp, the cop is the grumpy but clean face of order, and your bank is full of Aresdollaz. To the SINless, if you are lucky the world is a place you get to visit once a day to scrub floors, the cop is the grumpy face that sternly tells you to keep moving, and your bank is not full of anything, because all your money is monopoly money on a flimsy card but it will get you some sythnanol at the local Shack. But hey, at least you get to watch those pretty lights from far away, neh? Better than living in a squat, bartering melted electronics for food...

Now you've gone and made me all nostalgic. *sniff*

I wonder if they'll bring back the armored type quality, where every rating/months the rating increases by 1.

To me, it seems like there should be some benefit to repeated validity checks on an ID if it passes. Or if your average ID manages to fool a fricking rating 6 checker, it should have a little tag that lets it trump lower rated checks in the future or something. Almost to the point that its more a background issue than a played one.