FaceTec breaks the online identity enigma, achieving remote identity verification gold with UR® Codes. The ground-breaking technology protocol provides unprecedented confidence in an environment overcome by uncertainty. Free verification software will be provided standalone and included in FaceTec’s globally deployed identity verification software suite, which has over 1.8 billion live installs and averages 2.6 million new daily installs.
For over a decade, online identity verification (IDV) has required users to upload a photo of their ID card or take a picture with their camera. Their sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII) usually goes to a third-party, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) service that can only guess about document authenticity. This scheme is not suitable for the post-Gen AI world, and users, identity issuers, and relying parties are in dire need of a true long-term solution. Previously, the most notable attempt to address identity security has been the biometric e-passport NFC chip, released in 2005. While secure, they are not used in most ID documents because of issues with usability, durability, and prohibitively high costs.
UR Codes store digitally signed, immutable face data to biometrically bind the codeholder to their identity data, yet are scannable by everyday devices. This privacy-protecting biometric security technology empowers secure, two-party remote identity verification at infinite scale.
Notable UR Code Features & Innovations:
- Security & Privacy by Design – UR Codes contain 72 bytes of digitally signed face feature vector data that cannot be reconstituted back into a human-viewable image.
- Universal & Very Low Cost Implementation – UR Codes employ widely used quick response (QR) encoding. Face data stored in a UR Code can be compared to a live, 3D person for remote identity verification or scanned by any application using the free UR Code matching software.
- Validation & Anti-Tampering – Every time a UR Code is scanned, the asymmetrical digital signature (included by the encoding organization) can be verified by the relying party.
- Storage Flexibility – Multiple biometric modalities for an individual, or data from multiple faces can be encoded into one UR Code.
For remote IDV, the secure data stored in a UR Code is biometrically matched to a live person. This affirms the data from the account holder and the codeholder are derived from the same physical person to a high level of confidence. FaceTec’s specially minified face data enables this confidence and provides face matching that is over ten times more accurate than can be achieved using a digital photo of a photo ID, with no possibility of the face data being tampered with, post encoding.
Every UR Code is optically scannable in QR code format and can be printed onto any document or displayed on a screen. The UR Code issuing authority encodes trusted face data derived from any 2D photo or a 3D FaceMap®, along with appropriate PII data.
The UR Code also contains that person’s unique account number, such as from a passport, and biometrically binds the face, account, and PII data together.
Printing on ID documents, diplomas, marriage certificates, birth certificates, credit cards, credit reports, event tickets, voting ballots, health insurance cards, ownership titles, etc., provides immutable biometric binding. UR Codes can also remain entirely digital and be displayed on mobile driver licenses (mDL), stored in digital wallets, photo reels, or even on a blockchain.
When UR Codes are added to identity documents by a legal identity issuing authority, codeholders can be remotely verified quickly and easily in a safer, faster, low-cost, two-party interaction. PII is no longer passed to potentially vulnerable third-party KYC/IDV services, and relying parties need not pay exorbitant fees for new user onboarding, or risk data privacy fines, lawsuits, or breaches from these services.
To empower as many people around the world as possible to prove their identities, UR Codes will remain free to encode (with an evergreen perpetual license) for all government identity issuers, schools, non-profit organizations, NGOs, and humanitarian organizations, and free to scan and match.
