Hacker News Reader

Comment by nunoferreira | Hacker News Reader

I am curious to see how those facial liveness check systems will adapt to this reality. They are a key pillar in the KYC and fraud prevention process in the fintech space.

View on HN

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to but the closest thing I'm aware of is video calls in Germany where you are asked to show your ID card. Those certainly wouldn't be easy to fool without being able to do this at runtime and consistently showing an altered ID with all safety features intact. The agent will give you specific instructions on how to hold your ID and where to put your face while also switching between front and rear cameras and using the camera light. They're also performed by specialised services that only offer that kind of verification.

Those are the fancy ones (scratching your ID card is still annoying). The less fancy ones use a lighting scheme on the phone or zooming methods to detect fake actors and do not require a human on the other side. The fancy ones also do not scale.

Scale relative to what? The fancy ones are the only ones I've ever encountered in Germany except when dealing with an American company that insisted I upload photographs of my ID card directly to them (which due to the lack of a proper privacy policy brought me close to ditching the client that asked we use them).

There's also Postident (which involves walking into a post office and showing the clerk your ID card in person) and eID (which requires a compatible smartphone and uses the digital data on the ID card itself). Video ID is pretty ubiquitous these days, so I'm not sure why you think it "doesn't scale".

If you're suggesting alternatives that only rely on biometrics, I don't think those are sufficient to fulfill the requirements of anti-money-laundering laws in Germany even if American KYC laws might allow them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com