KYC does not establish that a bot belongs to a human

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:05

   Is that a trusted way to actually prove my identity? What's wrong with these current systems? Yeah. So first and foremost, I think that's not a way to prove your identity, right? That's a way to give your bot access to your emails. And that may be a useful thing or not, depending on whether you want that. And then you have to trust that the company will be responsible with your emails. So it's not very pricey preserving. It may or may not be secure depending on the provider, But it certainly does not prove that the bot belongs to a human.

2. 12:31

   And so how do people try to solve the problem of, like, whether something belongs to a human or not? Well, similar to, like, it used to be on websites, right? Like, how did Twitter try to solve this a few years ago? By KYC-ing you, right? By asking you to verify your identity with, like, take a photo of an ID, take a selfie, and you're on your way. And so that has two problems. The first one is it's not private at all, right?

3. 12:53

   You have to give any company a photo of your ID with all your personal information, your date of birth, your address in many cases, your legal name. You have to take a selfie. And then that, you have to trust that company to store that on some servers. And maybe most of them try really hard to safeguard it. But at some point, one of them like screws up and then all your data ends up on the internet.

4. 13:14

   And so first, it's not private. And second, it just doesn't work. And that's the hard thing that many of these companies have learned. that what bad actors do now is that just like you can fake anything with AI, it's also pretty easy to create a fake ID and to do a deep fake when you're doing the selfie step. So all of a sudden you can pretend to be someone that doesn't exist or even worse, pretend to be someone that does exist and you're stealing their identity.

5. 13:37

   And so we think that KYC is not the answer. It solves other problems. I think there's a role for legal identity, but it does not solve the proof of human question. And so what we do instead is we do a one-time real-world verification where you show up to a location with one of our devices, the orb, it takes a photo of you, it doesn't store that photo, it sends it to your phone, and it gets only stored on your phone.

6. 14:01

   And so that photo essentially asks a certificate of like, hey, someone, one of our cameras has seen you, you are a real and a unique human that only has one ID. And so you can use cool cryptography like Zero Knowledge Bruce, which you're very familiar with anonymized multi-party computation um and a number of other uh cryptographic alternatives that essentially what they allow you to do is number one your personal data is only your custody and number two every time you're using that id you're doing so anonymously such that you're uh what you do between websites cannot be linked and so it's like it's really cool it's like math rocket science uh it runs all on device so we've been working for many many years to be able to run this not just on the latest iphone but like really all android phones

7. 14:41

   and people are using this every day. It's like rocket science made real and we just abstract it all the way and make it super simple so that neither users nor developers have to worry about that complexity. We'll continue monitoring right after this message from our sponsors.