Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. You're listening to Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Business Week with Carol Masser and tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio. Carol,
Speaker 1: you have traveled abroad in the last year, did it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You did. You went and visited your daughter.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he came back to the airport.
Speaker 2: Thanks too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, prom he came back to the airport.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You're in line Customs and Border Protection totally. You go
Speaker 1: up to them, you give them your passport. They said,
Speaker 1: you say, I'm Carol Masser, and they say, how do
Speaker 1: we know you're Carol Masser? Facial recognition, well, facial verification.
Speaker 1: There's a difference. Andrew Budd is going to explain it.
Speaker 1: And Andrew Budd's product is actually used by Customs and
Speaker 1: Border Protection in that exact situation to verify that we
Speaker 1: are who we say we are when we are crossing borders.
Speaker 2: I love that you said that because it's an interesting designation.
Speaker 2: So let's get to it. Alex, I'm sorry. Andrew Bud
Speaker 2: is with us. He's founder and CEO of I Prove
Speaker 2: and he joins us from Amsterdam. It's good to have
Speaker 2: you here, especially as we are continuing to embark on
Speaker 2: our new world order thanks to AI. Tell us a
Speaker 2: little bit more about your company and the importance of
Speaker 2: this distinction between facial verification versus facial recognition, because they're
Speaker 2: very different things.
Speaker 3: They are very different, and it's very easy for them
Speaker 3: to be confused. Look, facial verification is about empowering the person,
Speaker 3: empowering the citizen. If you can use your face to
Speaker 3: secure your own identity, if you know that it's happening,
Speaker 3: if you've consented to it's happening, if you get personal
Speaker 3: benefit from it's happening, and your privacy is protected, that's
Speaker 3: facial verification. That's empowering the citizen. Facial recognition is about
Speaker 3: identifying people, often without their consent, often without their knowledge.
Speaker 3: It's a completely different thing, and that's about empowering organizations.
Speaker 3: It's empowering, about tracking people. Facial verification is about empowering
Speaker 3: It's about enabling you to use your face as a
Speaker 3: security credential. And it's a great chrisk security credential because
Speaker 3: it can't be stolen, it can't be lost, and it
Speaker 3: can't be shared.
Speaker 1: So is a face ID on an iPhone, for example?
Speaker 1: Is that facial recognition or facial verification.
Speaker 3: That's facial verification very much. Facial verification.
Speaker 1: Facial recognition is essentially used for security purposes by third parties.
Speaker 1: Then how would you define facial recognition?
Speaker 3: Yes, offacial recognition is really, in our terms about surveillance.
Speaker 3: It's about identifying who the person is. Facial verification is
Speaker 3: when I start by saying, Hey, I'm the owner of
Speaker 3: this phone. Hey, I'm the owner of this passport. Hey
Speaker 3: I'm the owner of this of this enterprise account. And
Speaker 3: I want to prove I now want to prove my face.
Speaker 3: I want to use my face to prove that I
Speaker 3: am who I've claimed to be. But with facial verification,
Speaker 3: I start by claiming who I am. In facial recognition,
Speaker 3: the system recognized.
Speaker 2: When my doorbell camera says he I recognize somebody familiar
Speaker 2: and it's the UPS delivery person. And then it says,
Speaker 2: I don't know it's your husband or it's your wife.
Speaker 2: Is that facial recognition gone wrong? In other words, like
Speaker 2: it's picked up some cues and there's some familiar you know,
Speaker 2: like I try to understand this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So ask yourself always does the does does the
Speaker 3: subject have agency? Does the subject, Does the subject know
Speaker 3: it's happening, have they consented to it happening? And are
Speaker 3: they getting personal benefit from it happening? Those are the
Speaker 3: real questions. So when you turn up at the border
Speaker 3: with CBP, we have systems installed in nearly a dozen
Speaker 3: airports around the US for global entry and now increases
Speaker 3: in the also for US citizens at Orlando, for example,
Speaker 3: you turn up, you can choose to go through these
Speaker 3: these these systems that are based upon facial verification. You
Speaker 3: are searching your agency by choosing to go uh and
Speaker 3: go to to go and present yourself. You don't have to,
Speaker 3: but if you do, it's a lot faster, it's a
Speaker 3: lot simpler, it's a much better experience, it's a lot
Speaker 3: more convenient.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about a little bit up the big
Speaker 1: business in the solution, because as I mentioned, the technology
Speaker 1: of I prove is being used by customs and Border
Speaker 1: Protection at entryways at airports. For example, You've got about
Speaker 1: you've raised about seventy million dollars. You've got employees all
Speaker 1: over the world, the US, UK, Latin America, Asia, Pacific,
Speaker 1: and more. How does the technology work?
Speaker 3: So most of what we do actually involves Verifying that
Speaker 3: people are whom they claim to be when they're not
Speaker 3: physically doesn't when they're at home, on their couch, for example,
Speaker 3: and they're trying to assert their identity for the purposes
Speaker 3: of opening an account or maybe very crucially resetting their credentials.
Speaker 3: When something's gone wrong. When a person's on their couch,
Speaker 3: it's really very difficult to know whether they are whom
Speaker 3: they claim to be. You can look at them. You
Speaker 3: can use your mobile phone to stream video to a
Speaker 3: central system and check do they look who like they should?
Speaker 3: That they look like who they claim to be, But
Speaker 3: how do you know they real? They're real? We live
Speaker 3: in a world of AI of deep When it's extremely
Speaker 3: straightforward to put a digital mosque over over a person's
Speaker 3: face and pretend to be to impersonate somebody, we stop
Speaker 3: that impersonation. We can detect when very accurately, when a
Speaker 3: deep fake is trying to be used to impersonate someone.
Speaker 2: Come on, Andrew, we've all seen like the Mission Impossible
Speaker 2: movies or something like.
Speaker 1: Those deep faces that's a long time ago too, are
Speaker 1: used twenty years ago, thirty years ago. I use nowadays.
Speaker 2: It's a lot better, right, exactly like the technology just
Speaker 2: gets better and better. So I mean, how do we
Speaker 2: make sure the facial verification systems stay ahead of you know,
Speaker 2: the AI that is creating those deep fakes in terms
Speaker 2: of their complexity. How do you do that?
Speaker 3: That's the central problem that we solve. That's what we've
Speaker 3: built a global business doing, and we've been doing it
Speaker 3: now for quite some time. Two things we do. One
Speaker 3: is we have we change the physics of the situation.
Speaker 3: We illuminate the user's face with a rapidly changing sequence
Speaker 3: of colors from screen of their own device. It's an
Speaker 3: unpredictable sequence of colors and it illuminates their face. And
Speaker 3: while those colors are illuminating their face, we stream video
Speaker 3: back to our servers where we look at how those
Speaker 3: that screen illumination. There's changing colors reflect off the user's face.
Speaker 3: They're unpredictable. The attackers can't know what it's going to
Speaker 3: look like, so they can't pre prepare some beautiful deep fake.
Speaker 3: That's one element of it. And then the other is
Speaker 3: we analyze everything that's happening worldwide all the time. We
Speaker 3: filter the systems and we study it so we can
Speaker 3: detect the attacks. We can detect if a foreign power,
Speaker 3: for example, is busily mounting a set of experiments, and
Speaker 3: we learn from them, and we learn more from them
Speaker 3: than they learn from us. So we stay ahead because
Speaker 3: we have better. We have visibility and they have no visibility.
Speaker 3: You know, information advantage enables us to win.
Speaker 1: Carol and I were talking ahead of this when we
Speaker 1: were preparing for this, and we've been traveling a lot,
Speaker 1: so it's on our mind. But we were members of
Speaker 1: Clear now because we are on the plane a lot.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's faster than the traditional security line. Sometimes it's not.
Speaker 1: It depends on that, Yeah, depending on where you are.
Speaker 1: But just sometimes we can get through security without even
Speaker 1: showing our plastic IDs. Does Clear use a system such
Speaker 1: as I prove?
Speaker 3: I can't comment on on clear. Clear have their own technology,
Speaker 3: they have a very sophisticated technology. What I can say
Speaker 3: is that when you go through Global Entry in places
Speaker 3: like Newark or Los Angeles or Miami, you walk up
Speaker 3: to it and I prove terminal, you don't do anything.
Speaker 3: You don't have to put out any card or any
Speaker 3: identification system. Your face is. Your face is captured and
Speaker 3: it's matched by a CBP itself against their traveler verification
Speaker 3: system they have, You've already in the past given them
Speaker 3: all of your details so that you're expected because you
Speaker 3: are coming in on a particular flight, and they kind
Speaker 3: of go, oh, yes, that's Andrew budd We were expecting him.
Speaker 3: We know we know his details because he's given them
Speaker 3: to us and we had them already. He looks like
Speaker 3: he's supposed to look like. Go forward. And the rate
Speaker 3: at which people can be pro like that is awesome.
Speaker 3: The places where we've been installed, we've eliminated. We've eliminated
Speaker 3: most of the cues or what happens.
Speaker 1: What happens if I don't look like I looked in
Speaker 1: the photo or the documents that I provided to the
Speaker 1: government maybe five or ten years ago. What if I've aged?
Speaker 1: What if I've have a different hair collar, What if
Speaker 1: I decided to get up saying what if I had
Speaker 1: a lot of work done to my face.
Speaker 3: One of the great advantages of face verification technology is
Speaker 3: that it works extraordinarily well, and it works a lot
Speaker 3: better than people do. There was a study done about
Speaker 3: a number of about a decade ago by university which
Speaker 3: showed that the performance of really skilled passport officers was
Speaker 3: of a level that is now about one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: times less good than a modern face verification system. Face
Speaker 3: verification systems tend to be relatively indifferent to face furniture
Speaker 3: as we call it, beards, glasses, piercings, and so on.
Speaker 3: They're really very good at matching people.
Speaker 2: Hey, one day, when I just ask you, before we
Speaker 2: get a little bit more into the business, just quickly,
Speaker 2: is a face better than a fingerprint?
Speaker 3: Yes? Absolutely? Why because they solve two different problems. When
Speaker 3: you're trying to verify somebody, you want to make sure
Speaker 3: that there's a good match, and you're not trying to
Speaker 3: figure out whether that which of seven billion people in
Speaker 3: the world this is. You know, they're expecting you and
Speaker 3: the challenges, and you just have to make sure that
Speaker 3: you look like the person accurately. There is so and
Speaker 3: a face is extremely good at doing that. But the
Speaker 3: reason a face is better is the real way that
Speaker 3: these things get attacked, especially remotely, is by fate forgeries, copies.
Speaker 3: These things. These things are and it's much easier to
Speaker 3: detect a It's much easier and much more feasible for
Speaker 3: us to detect a forged or deep faked face or
Speaker 3: deep faked fingerprint because there's so much more information, there's
Speaker 3: so much more texture, there's so much more depth, there's
Speaker 3: so much more information around a face. The ambient illumination
Speaker 3: is very important, so you get much more more information
Speaker 3: from a face, which makes it much more reliable to
Speaker 3: protect whether a face is real or not.
Speaker 1: Interesting, are we going to start to see this type
Speaker 1: of technology being used in more places than just unlocking
Speaker 1: something on our phone or getting through the line at
Speaker 1: the airport where.
Speaker 3: Absolutely you're going to see this so so already. If
Speaker 3: you want to set up bank accounts in many parts
Speaker 3: of the world, you go through you I prove yourself remotely,
Speaker 3: You I prove yourself to do the Know your Customer
Speaker 3: KYC thing to make sure that the person setting up
Speaker 3: the account is genuinely the person that they claim to
Speaker 3: be and not somebody being a money an impersonating money
Speaker 3: mule who's going to launder money. That's already happening in
Speaker 3: many parts of the world, not so much in the
Speaker 3: US yet. For enterprises, we're going to see staff doing
Speaker 3: this both at the time when they're hired and also
Speaker 3: when they have to reset their credentials when they're hired.
Speaker 3: There's there's now a real problem in the United States
Speaker 3: with impersonators, particularly members of the North Korean Secret Service,
Speaker 3: impersonating American staff and being signed up and given jobs
Speaker 3: to work remotely. The first of the there was a
Speaker 3: very public case in the summer of last year. Now,
Speaker 3: the CITO of Mandian, which is a cybersecurity company, says
Speaker 3: that literally every fortune five hundred company has at least dozens,
Speaker 3: if not hundreds of job applications North Korean IT workers
Speaker 3: whose faces have been deep faked to look like American
Speaker 3: staff when they're not. Three hundred US companies have been
Speaker 3: scammed by a woman who played guilty in February for
Speaker 3: having run a scheme like this. So it's a huge thing.
Speaker 3: So our technology will make sure that the person who
Speaker 3: is being hired remotely is whom they claim to be.
Speaker 3: And then you know when you come to reset your password,
Speaker 3: you haven't got any other way to assure yourself all right,
Speaker 3: that will be used for that.
Speaker 2: Stay in touch, Love to check in with you again
Speaker 2: in the future. Andrew bad founder and CEO of I
Speaker 2: Prove joining us right here on Business Week