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by helsontaveras18 868 days ago
Online banks require you to provide such photos of an ID. Also, registration for government services.

However, in the banking case (and likely government, but I cannot speak to that directly) they are running your data against a KYC API so chances of your information being valid are low.

3 comments

What API takes a photograph and tells you whether the person who gave it to you is in physical possession of the ID document depicted on it?

This flow was designed, and only works, for branch-based KYC: The bank employee physically looks at the ID, makes sure it's you, examines the many physically hard-to-forge elements on the card, and then queries an API that tells them whether the same ID was ever issued with that data on it (name and photo).

Bringing that flow online in the age of GANs is an absurd concept, right up there with using a short, unchangeable numeric personal identifier as a bearer token for authentication. The fact that financial institutions in some countries actually do both doesn't make it any less absurd.

I registered for login.gov using my face and an ID, which allowed me to register for submitting tax records among other things.
Not only that, but in some cases your picture is also ran across a database. There is a company called Veridas who does this for banks, and since they are allowed by their clients to x-reference data,! has identified identity thiefs showing up in 4 banks with four stolen identities but the same face.

They offer all validations behind an API, so you don’t need to know how a Nigeria driving license looks like.

Nice people and nice products.

It's pretty foolish to accept picture ID without being face-to-face with the person to match the two.

Even if the rest of the ID is fake, at least you have a record of that person's face; you can attest to the fact that the person who gave you the ID, whoever they may be, looks like the picture you have.