ICYMI: Facial Recognition vs Facial Verification
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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Carol, you have traveled abroad in the last year. Did I? Yeah, you did. You went and visited your daughter. Oh, yeah, that's right. You came back to the airport. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, no problem. You came back to the airport. Yeah. You're in line, Customs and Border Protection. Totally. You go up to them. You give them your passport. You say, I'm Carol Masser.

And they say, how do we know you're Carol Masser? Facial recognition? Well, facial verification. Ah, there's a difference. There's a difference. Andrew Budd is going to explain it. And Andrew Budd's product is actually used by Customs and Border Protection in that exact situation to verify that we are who we say we are when we are crossing borders. I love that you said that because it's an interesting designation. So let's get to it. Alex, uh,

I'm sorry, Andrew Budd is with us. He's founder and CEO of iProve and he joins us from Amsterdam. It's good to have you here, especially as we are continuing to embark on our new world order thanks to AI. Tell us a little bit more about your company and the importance of this distinction between facial verification versus facial recognition because they're very different things. They are very different and it's very easy for them to be confused. Look,

uh facial verification is about empowering the person empowering the citizen if if you can use your face to secure your own identity if you know that it's happening if you've consented to it's happening um if you if you uh get personal benefit from it's happening and your privacy is protected

That's facial verification, that's empowering the citizen. Facial recognition is about identifying people, often without their consent, often without their knowledge. It's a completely different thing and that's about empowering organizations, it's empowering about

tracking people. Facial verification is about empowering. It's about enabling you to use your face as a security credential. And it's a great security credential because it can't be stolen, it can't be lost, and it can't be shared. So is a face ID on an iPhone, for example, is that facial recognition or facial verification? That's facial verification, very much facial verification. Facial recognition is essentially used...

For security purposes by third parties then what how would you define facial recognition? Yes, facial recognition is really in our terms about surveillance It's about identifying who the person is facial verification is when I start by saying hey, I'm the owner of this phone Hey, I'm the owner of this passport. Hey, I'm the owner of this of this enterprise account and I want to prove I now want to prove my face I want to use my face to

prove that I am who I've claimed to be. But with facial verification, I start by claiming who I am in facial recognition, the system recognizes me. So Andrew, when my doorbell camera says, hey, I recognize somebody familiar and it's the UPS delivery person. And then it says, I don't know, it's your husband or it's your wife. Is that facial recognition gone wrong? In other words, like it's picked up some cues and there's some familiar, you know, like I try to understand that.

Yeah. So ask yourself always does the subject have agency? Does the subject know it's happening? Have they consented to it happening? And are they getting personal benefit from it happening?

Those are the real questions. So when you turn up at the border with CBP, we have systems installed in nearly a dozen airports around the US for global entry and now increasingly also for US citizens at Orlando, for example. You turn up, you can choose to go through these systems that are based upon facial verification.

You're asserting your agency by choosing to go and present yourself. You don't have to. But if you do, it's a lot faster. It's a lot simpler. It's a much better experience. It's a lot more convenient. Well, let's talk about a little bit of the business and the solution, because as I mentioned, the technology of iProove is being used by Customs and Border Protection at entryways at airports, for example.

You've raised about $70 million. You've got employees all over the world, the US, UK, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and more. How does the technology work? So most of what we do actually involves verifying that people are whom they claim to be when they're not physically present, when they're at home on their couch, for example, and they're trying to assert their identity for the purposes of opening an account or maybe, very crucially, resetting their credentials when something's gone wrong.

When a person's on their couch, it's really very difficult to know whether they are whom they claim to be. You can look at them. You can use your mobile phone to stream video to a central system and check that they look like they should, that they look like who they claim to be. But how do you know they're real? We live in a world of AI, of deepfakes, when it's extremely straightforward to put a digital mask over a person's face.

and pretend to impersonate somebody. We stop that impersonation. We can detect very accurately when a deepfake is trying to be used to impersonate someone. - Come on, Andrew, we've all seen like the Mission Impossible movies or something like where those deepfakes- - That was a long time ago too. - Right? Are used to kind- - It was like 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Nowadays it's a lot better.

Right, exactly. Like the technology just gets better and better. So, I mean, how do we make sure the facial verification systems stay ahead of, you know, the AI that is creating those deep fakes in terms of their complexity? How do you do that?

That's the central problem that we solve. That's what we built a global business doing. We've been doing it now for quite some time. Two things we do. One is we change the physics of the situation. We illuminate the user's face with a rapidly changing sequence of colors from the screen of their own device. It's an unpredictable sequence of colors.

and it illuminates their face. And while those colors are illuminating their face, we stream video back to our servers where we look at how that screen illumination, those changing colors reflect off the user's face. They're unpredictable. The attackers can't know what it's going to look like, so they can't pre-prepare some beautiful deep fake. That's one element of it. And then the other is we analyze everything that's happening worldwide all the time. We filter the systems and we study it so we can detect the attacks. We can detect

If a foreign power, for example, is busily mounting a set of experiments and we learn from them and we learn more from them than they learn from us. So we stay ahead because we have better visibility and they have no visibility. Information advantage enables us to win. Carol and I were talking ahead of this when we were preparing for this and we've been traveling a lot, so it's on our mind. But we were members of Clear now because we are on the plane a lot. Sometimes it's faster than...

the traditional security line. Sometimes it's not. It is sometimes, yeah. Depending on where you are. But sometimes we can get through security without even showing our plastic IDs. Does Clear use a system such as iProove? I can't comment on Clear. Clear have their own technology. They have a very sophisticated technology. What I can say is that when you go through global entry in places like Newark or Los Angeles or Miami, you walk up to an iProove terminal

You don't do anything. You don't have to pull out any card or any identification system. Your face is captured and it's matched by CBP itself against their traveler verification system. You've already in the past given them all of your details so that you're expecting

because you are coming in on a particular flight and they kind of go, oh yes, that's Andrew Budd. We were expecting him. We know his details because he's given them to us and we had them already. He looks like he's supposed to look like, go forward. And the rate at which people can be processed like that is awesome. In the places where we've been installed, we've eliminated most of the queues. What happens if I don't look like I looked in the photo or the documents that I provided to Andrew?

the government maybe five or ten years ago what if i've aged what if i've have a different hair color what if i decided to get a piercing what if i had a lot of work done to my face one of the great advantages of face verification technology is that it works extraordinarily well and it works a lot better than people do um there was a study done about a number of about a decade ago by a university which showed that um the performance of really skilled passport officers

was of a level that is now about 100,000 times less good than a real, than a modern face verification system. Face verification systems tend to be relatively indifferent to face furniture, as we call it, beards, glasses, piercings, and so on. They're really very good at matching people. Hey, one thing I want to just ask you before we get a little bit more into the business, just quickly, is a face better than a fingerprint?

Yes, absolutely. Why? Because they solve two different problems. When you're trying to verify somebody, you want to make sure that there's a good match. And you're not trying to figure out which of seven billion people in the world this is.

They're expecting you and the challenges. And you just have to make sure that you look like the person accurately. And a face is extremely good at doing that. But the reason the face is better is the real way that these things get attacked, especially remotely, is by forgeries, copies.

These things are, and it's much easier to detect a, it's much easier, much more feasible for us to detect a forged or deep faked face than a forged or deep faked fingerprint. Because there's so much more information, there's so much more texture, there's so much more depth, there's so much more information.

around a face, ambient illumination is very important. So you get much more information from a face, which makes it much more reliable to detect whether a face is real or not. Interesting. Are we going to start to see this type of technology being used in more places than just unlocking something on our phone or getting through the line at the airport? Oh, yes.

Where? Absolutely. You're going to see this. So already, if you want to set up bank accounts in many parts of the world, you go through, you I prove yourself remotely, you I prove yourself to do the know your customer KYC thing to make sure the person setting up the account is genuinely the person that they claim to be and not somebody being a money, an impersonating money mule who's going to launder money. That's already happening in many parts of the world, not so much in the US yet.

For enterprises, we're going to see staff doing this both at the time when they're hired and also when they have to reset their credentials. When they're hired, there's now a real problem in the United States with impersonators, particularly members of the North Korean Secret Service.

impersonating American staff and being signed up and given jobs to work remotely. The first of the, there was a very public case in the summer of last year. Now the CTO of Mandian, which is a cybersecurity company, says that literally every Fortune 500 company has at least dozens, if not hundreds of job applications from North Korean IT workers whose faces have been deep faked to look like American staff when they're not.

300 US companies have been scammed by a woman who played guilty in February for having run a scheme like this. So it's a huge thing. So our technology will make sure that the person who is being hired remotely is whom they claim to be. And then, you know, when you come to reset your password, you haven't got any other way to assure yourself.

All right. Got it, Ron. So that'll be useful to us as well. Hey, stay in touch. Love to check in with you again in the future. Andrew Budd, founder and CEO of iProove, joining us right here on Business Week.

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