Facial recognition For Digital Financial ID

To date, I have written repeatedly about the authorities' drive towards a biosensored digital ID for every global citizen, brought to us and administered by a gaggle of United Nations agencies, big banks, big pharma and big ‘charities’ and NGOs. Together with Big Data, tracking & tracing and the Internet of Things, this doesn’t look good for our immediate future. Freedom and privacy are about to disappear if and when this brave new world starts to materialise on a large scale.

The deadline for testing ID technology

In the United Nation's paper entitled ID2020 Concept for Public/Private Partnership (now removed from the internet it seems), the year 2020 has been earmarked as the deadline for developing and testing technology for this coming digital identity:

How it works

Today’s article is about one such a technological solution being tested: Facial recognition. But first a quick preview on how the technology works and what the different applications are:

NEC: Orchestrating a brighter world. (their slogan, not mine)

The technology can also be seen in the film 'The Circle', where Global Citizens are tracked 24/7. In the storyline, a demonstration is set up where a wanted fugitive can be tracked down in a matter of minutes.

Facial recognition technology in 'The Circle'

Facial recognition and your bank

So here is today's article from the Center for Financial Inclusion Blog, with the author giving his opinion as he writes:

WeBank started piloting facial recognition for KYC (“know your customer”—verifying that a customer is who they say they are) last year—we heard about it when we talked with Jared Shu, a partner with McKinsey, as part of our deep dive about the different ways banks pursue financial inclusion.

At that point, the technology was mere possibility, with some question about whether the regulator would allow it. Now, it seems, facial recognition is indeed serving as a form of identity in China. With the help of technology, customers can quite literally authorize a transaction using their face.

Alipay, a mobile payment app launched by Alibaba in 2004 and used by 120 million people in China, is partnering with Face++ (pronounced “face plus plus”) to allow people to use their face as a credential to make payments. The technology is a natural extension of using a fingerprint to verify a person’s identity, and it is far more secure than just comparing a signature on the back of a credit card to a signature on a receipt.

Software can distinguish between faces far better than humans can. You may have noticed this when you uploaded photos to social media like Facebook and the platform suggested names for the faces in your photos.

Face++ uses 83 different points on the human face to verify a person, assigning a measure to the distance between each of the points. It is this combination of distances that verifies identity.

The technology’s use cases go beyond the financial system to unlocking doors (literal ones—as in you don’t carry a key any longer), tracking down criminals, or verifying Uber drivers/riders.

A scenario is even possible in which a customer walks into a store and receives a personalized experience based on their previous spending—just like Tom Cruise gets to enjoy in “Minority Report.”

While I am slightly disturbed by some of the implications of corporations having a searchable image of my face on their servers, I am optimistic about the possibilities that this technology offers. Open a bank account by holding up your iPad to your face! Split a cab fare by holding a smartphone to your friend’s face! Send money for your niece’s birthday using voice recognition technology even while you’re stuck on the bus! More convenience in my financial services? Yes, please.

The big news should be small microfinance institutions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo equipping their staff with iPads that will enable them to solve the problem of the majority of the population not having a government-issued id.

Biometric identifying - fingerprinting. iris scans, facial recognition, tracking and tracing... all these technologies have so far only been used on a small scale. The various pilots are all separate as far as I know. But not for much longer. There is only one factor missing to connect all the dots: the Digital Financial ID inside our bodies, linking to our profiled Big Database in the cloud, administered by whichever entity will be in control over it by 2030.