You know the story…you’ve added some photos from a recent family gathering to Facebook and within seconds, suggestions of people to tag come up. Nine times out of ten, these suggestions are spot-on. Technology can be intuitive, can’t it? As a tech giant, some of Facebook’s features are about as intuitive as it gets but now, they’re even erring on the side of caution when it comes to privacy. Its facial recognition feature for tagged photos is no longer an option. In November 2021, Facebook’s parent company Meta decommissioned this feature, citing “there are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society…we believe limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate”.
Closer to home, a ‘search engine for faces’ start-up Clearview was found by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office to be in breach of the Privacy Act 1988 due to its unsolicited access to Australians’ sensitive information including personal details and photos from their social media accounts.
So, this begs the question for legal professionals – in this digital world, how do you strike a balance between valuing your clients’ right to privacy while ensuring your due-diligence is bulletproof and how can you reassure your clients that their sensitive information is only being used for the right purposes?
Facial recognition vs. facial verification
Simply put, facial recognition matches a face against a database. That’s how Facebook could guess who was in your photos – the face was matched against the billions of photos on Facebook and put the pieces together based on who was in your friends list.
Facial verification, on the other hand, matches an official identity document against a person’s face in real-time. This greatly decreases the risk of fraud or forgery. Meeting a client in-person to have contracts signed is, in many cases, no longer practical. Sending these high value documents via post is fraught with risk including getting misplaced, taking too long, or being tampered with. Having the identity of your client isn’t fool proof either. Manual verification of identity methods such as an over-the-counter appointment at a post office, a bank or a JP witness can be subject to human error. How do they know your client isn’t a twin who’s gone rogue and signing their sibling’s life away to a million-dollar mortgage? We can’t expect humans to get it right 100% of the time, so that’s why facial verification is so handy and facial recognition is a high-risk way of verifying identity.
We’d be hard pressed to find a lawyer who hasn’t had a client resist a Verification of Identity (VOI) due to privacy concerns. This most commonly relates to the storage of data and what the data will be used for in future. They may be concerned about the number of people handling their data in between signing and settlement. This isn’t just paranoia – it’s an understandable concern given the most recent Medibank, Optus and Latitude data breach cases.
What’s the solution?
Privacy will always be of concern to your clients. It’s your job to reassure them that their data is safe, while ensuring you’ve mitigated as much risk as possible in a transaction. Livesign gives you the best of both worlds. Your client will simultaneously digitally sign their loan documents and have their identity digitally verified. To verify your clients’ identity, livesign intuitively extracts the photo from your client’s ePassport and biometrically compares it to a selfie taken at the time of verification. This gives you the reassurance that you can proceed with allowing the transaction to go ahead because you know with certainty your client is indeed who they say they are. With this process, you’ll not just have reassurance – you’ll also save time and mitigate the risk of error so commonly associated with signing hard copy documents (say goodbye to signing in the wrong places, missed signatures, typos and incorrect dates!).
What about your client’s privacy?
This brings us back to one of the major concerns about digital verification. Your client still may ask questions about their privacy and how their data is handled. livesign doesn’t require you to store any identification data or documents which means they can’t be lost, tampered with, or destroyed. The records are encrypted, personal information is redacted and stored digitally so only you and authorised people in your business can access them to complete the settlement.
Let’s get started…
Now’s the time to move into the era of digital convenience without the risk. Facial verification is the way to go if you want to know for sure who you’re preparing documents for. It’s the way to go if you want to protect your firm’s reputation.
