To Distribute UBI GoodDollar Needs To Use Digital Photo Authentication – And Now We Can

The GoodDollar team has been working away in the background on many things – including digital photo authentication – and is proud to announce that we have now added a face-verification feature in the GoodDollar universal basic income wallet application.

This article outlines what digital photo authentication / face verification means for users, how it works, why it is important for our project to reduce global wealth inequality, and what we hope this capability achieves.

Firstly, and briefly, here are the three steps you will need to take to achieve digital photo authentication — it’s selfie time.

1. The next time you log into your wallet — if you aren’t already signed up to the GoodDollar demo, please sign up here — you’ll be prompted to scan your face with your smartphone or on your computer. The resulting image will be used to verify that the person claiming G$ is indeed you, and remains you. This digital photo authentication is critical for GoodDollar.
2. Go ahead and claim your daily GoodDollar coins (G$) as you normally would.
3. Please note you will be asked to re-verify yourself, through re-scanning your face, every 14 days. Why the need for more digital photo authentication? Well, you might have a post-lockdown beard shave, for example.

The GoodDollar protocol launch is coming soon this summer, and this new face-verification / digital photo authentication feature is key to ensuring the GoodDollar economy works as fairly and securely as possible. Our focus of deployment is ensuring that each human being only has one GoodDollar account.

We do this through maintaining an anonymized dataset of the facemaps of all that people that register and for every new user the technology verifies that the face submitted does not already exist in the dataset.

Protecting the privacy of our users is paramount, and we have deployed this feature in anticipation of the launch of our protocol and distributing G$ coins. The sole purpose of this feature is to prevent and reduce system abuse. (Here is the current privacy policy.)

Now For The Science …

This digital photo authentication / face-verification feature is brought to you by FaceTec’s ZoOm® technology, who have shown their commitment to advancing basic income through enabling GoodDollar to use their unique technology. FaceTec’s 3D FaceMaps are created with a two-second video face scan and are used to prove each user’s liveness and uniqueness in the GoodDollar system.

GoodDollar chose this biometric solution because of its world-leading accuracy — only one mistake out of 12.8 million users, on average — its readiness, and because the FaceTec team is rigorously developing their artificial intelligence to increase its accuracy even more.

Solving UBI’s Biggest Challenges

Unique identity is one of the most significant challenges that all projects working in the universal basic income (UBI) space. Different projects have different approaches, with many making unique identity a key focus of their products.

Throughout the decentralized technology market, there are many brilliant people and interesting companies that are working on decentralized approaches to unique and secure digital identity. Thankfully, there is no shortage of brilliant individuals and companies working on solving the challenge of decentralized identity.

Interesting products that we look at and admire for this include, for example, our friend Jan Moritz Lindemann at UBIC, who uses a proof-of-passport model to attempt to reduce system abuse. And we are very excited to monitor all the cool solutions emerging from BrightID, among other projects.

At GoodDollar we are committed to continuous evaluation of decentralized identity solutions as they evolve. Ultimately, like any company operating in a decentralized framework, we are constantly toeing the line to find the balance between privacy and security.

As we look towards the launch of the protocol in the coming weeks, we are pleased to release this face-recognition feature that brings us that much closer to our ultimate goal: distributing a global basic income on blockchain.

Please let us know what you think – and don’t forget to smile.