Yoti (Your Own Trusted Identity) is a London-based start-up that has created what they call a ‘digital ID solution’, by using facial recognition as a form of ID and proof of ticket purchase. Launched in 2011, and now valued at £82 million, the Yoti app has been downloaded by 4.7 million people globally.
At the moment, it’s most commonly used in the public, travel, and retail sectors. They’ve established a partnership with Heathrow Airport “to explore biometric travel for passengers.” They also work with NCR Corporation, who make self-service kiosks in supermarkets, and social media app Yubo, who are using their technology to “safeguard” young people online. Last year, the Government of Jersey chose them as its digital identity provider. This, they claim, has resulted in 10% of Jersey’s adult population becoming their customers.
Now, they are attempting to revolutionise the night time economy. A festival in Jersey, The Weekender, is using the app for alcohol sales. Five bars and clubs in Bournemouth — Cameo, Halo, Truth, Yates, and Walkabout — now accept Yoti.
The Yoti offering to the UK club-goer is essentially a more streamlined system of getting in. For the venue, it can mean less blaggers (who are either too young, have no ticket, or have been booted out before), and an opportunity, if the user consents, to collect data on their customers for marketing purposes. The vision for the start-up is that once everyone has their Yoti digital ID, they’ll use it for everything you need ID for, not just getting into a club — to go through airports, for government checks, to buy alcohol, tobacco, and energy drinks, and so on.
It all sounds a bit 1984, right? We spoke to John Abbott, Chief Business Officer of Yoti, in an attempt to glean some more information about how this technology works and, more to the point, what is happening to all that data.
Abbott talked us through the sign-up process. “You create your Yoti ID wallet, and we allow you to take your selfie then we scan your ID. We do some very stringent checks on that in terms of the authenticity of the document, making sure that you’re not a fraudster.” Then what happens? “Once you’ve got that, you very simply share what that business wants to receive. In the nightclub case, they may want to receive the fact that you’ve purchased a ticket and that you are over 18. It’s a quick reshare, if you like, of that data. A very slimmed down version of the driver’s licence.”
So, when I arrive at the club, would I just show my phone or look into a camera? “We can do two options,” Abbott says. “The most preferred option is just scanning a QR code. In some of those cases you could enable in a venue, if the user consented, to use that as a facial entry. It is similar to some of our airport solutions.” Is the data shared with any third parties? “The main thing that we want to avoid is the collection of lots of data in one place,” he asserts. “So we ensure that you, the individual, hold the keys to your data. And only you: We don’t hold a copy so we can’t give them away to anyone else.
“Your encrypted data points — your first name, your last name, your date of birth, your face — are all separately encrypted, only coming back to your key to unlock those,” he continues. “Not even Yoti could get into your data even if we tried.” Could it end up on any government databases? “No, absolutely not. From a consumer perspective, the last thing they want with securing their IDs is to know that the government is tracking their information. Regardless of your government’s intentions or otherwise, it comes back to consent – of what they shared the data for.”
What would happen if I just borrowed someone’s phone and took it to the door staff? That seems like a plausible abuse of the system. “Your document image and details are matched to your facial biometrics,” a spokesperson for Yoti told DJ Mag, in a follow-up email. “Another person trying to add a different face to a verified Yoti would get rejected by our systems, which are a combination of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) approved facial recognition software and a trained team of super recognisers in a cleanroom environment.” They continued: “If security staff had any doubts if the person had swapped phones, they could ask them to update their core Yoti picture and they would be rejected on the spot.”
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