How is someone confirmed as who they are today? Ironically, the very same assets from decades ago are still used today, just with electronic scanning instead of paper and phones.
Whether it’s government-issued IDs, driver’s licenses, passports or more, documentation is a key factor in confirming who someone is legally. While the court process and order is the official form of declaration if needed, in practice personal documents and identification cards are the key factors for regular verification. However, the ability to fake these documents is also very widespread and extremely professional. Document identity verification becomes that much more important than identity confirmation.
Technology Forced a Gamechanger
As noted earlier, when the world moved online with identity verification, it switched a lot of paradigms in government, industry and even going to a nightclub. Combine that same technology with mobile equipment, and identity verification jumped forward exponentially. Of course, without secure channels, it also became easily hackable, and that made it easy to create fraudulent identities too. So, the security side of things had to jump forward fast too to catch up.
The need for advanced verification sped up. Add a code to a driver’s license, someone figured out how to fake it. Add a foil or camera-ready waterprint image, and someone designed a way to produce the same. The constant race of tamper-proofing and cracking the same became a bit of a stalemate until the last three years, when computer scanning and digital recognition broke through for widespread use. Combined with computerized monitoring and linkages to databases, identity verification suddenly leaped forward in a way that becomes much harder to beat. That shift has become an advantage for credential protection as well for companies needing effective verification as well.
Reinventing the Identity Proofing Process
Much of what was needed in a modern response to identity fraud took a rethinking about how identity documents could be verified. It has moved from an old paradigm of confirming facts and references to now matching unique features of a person, the more familiar of which is the person’s biometric data. The combination of records and biometric data has become a proven effective barrier to fake production; one literally has to have proof of the original to fake the original. While that’s not necessarily impossible even in a digital age, it is a lot harder to fabricate artificially.
The integration of this layer of security is now regularly referenced as customer identity and access management, or CIAM for short. It’s a term that is going to become bread and butter for most involved in personnel management, security and verification in general.
The integration of this layer of security is now regularly referenced as customer identity and access management, or CIAM for short. It’s a term that is going to become bread and butter for most involved in personnel management, security and verification in general. Blockchain and crypto platforms have felt the early demand for verification the most, providing prime examples that will affect other industries as required identity regulation spreads. These firms have been pushed headlong into the “know your customer” world, or KYC, thanks to newly-passed laws to prevent digital money laundering through crypto. While many rely on a basic government-issued ID image capture, the more professional outfits are combining the same with, no surprise, biometrics.
Modern Advantages of Tech Verification Integration
For businesses, entities and organizations that take a proactive position, identity verification becomes implemented through a combination of online application, mobile flexibility and even artificial intelligence enhancement to catch subtle details missed by the human eye.
The same also enhances the validity and provision of services in other applications too. Confirmation of financial asset ownership, access, health provision, travel ability status and much, much more come into play. The recent pandemic of 2020 provides a vivid reason why identity validation combined with vaccination can become the difference in being able to travel internationally or being restricted, for example. The same will likely expand to banking, employment and even voting over the next few years, again focused on rooting out fraud and protecting accurate identity. It literally is the beginning of the digital age in everyday life becoming reality.