When someone asked on LinkedIn why IDScan.net had all that personably identifiable information in the first place, I remembered something about the ability to perform identity verification. Specifically, I remembered one significant sentence from my paradox of identity verification. Emphasis mine.
“To prevent fraud you have to risk fraud by giving selfie plus ID to a firm you don’t know—not Meta or Hertz, but a third party vendor you don’t know.”
Look at simple (?) facial recognition, which Amazon and Google and Meta could perform if they weren’t scared of their own customers. (That fear may have subsided.)
What is identity verification?
But identity verification is much more complex.
- Yes, it includes facial recognition as well as related disciplines such as presentation attack detection and injection attack detection.
- But it also includes analysis of a government-issued secure document such as a driver’s license or passport. This analysis checks some of the document’s security features to determine whether it is authentic.
- Then it naturally compares the live face against the driver’s license face to see if they belong to the same person.
- And in many cases that’s not enough, as identity verification goes beyond who you are and what you have. That includes checking state or provincial motor vehicle records to confirm that the motor vehicle agency knows about this license it supposedly entered.
- Or it checks credit records, utility records, and the like to confirm that a person is associated with an address, a birthdate, or other personally identifiable information.
- Or, and as long as they’re at it, the identity verification process ensures you’re not on an anti-money laundering (AML) sanctions list, a list of politically exposed persons (PEP), or a similar blocklist. Hertz may not care, but Bank of America certainly does.
So who can do all of this?
Who can’t perform identity verification
I will tell you who can’t.
Meta can’t do all this, and neither can Amazon or Google.
And Hertz can’t do all this either, and neither can Bank of America or Jerry Rainbow’s Cannabis Shoppe.
Why? Because multi-billion dollar companies, and Jerry, don’t understand all the skills needed. Sure Amazon can route goods within warehouses, but it doesn’t know squat about ghost images or microprinting, much less how to check PEP lists.
Who can perform identity verification
So Meta et al outsource their identity verification work to companies that most of you don’t know.
But I do. I worked at Incode for a year and analyzed over 80 of its competitors while I was there.
(Dirty little secret: NONE of these identity verification vendors author ALL their algorithms. Sure they may own intellectual property for certain tasks, but they buy the other tasks from other suppliers.)
But who are you?
Are you a large company trying to understand the identity verification market?
Are you an identity verification company trying to understand your own market?
Do you need confidential help to analyze and plan the impossible?
Perhaps Bredemarket’s identity verification and product marketing expertise is what you need.
Talk to me.
Oh, as a postscript: remember when I created three similar videos last Saturday night? I also created a fourth one just for the identity folks.
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