Technology

I’d still buy chicken there.

In case you're like me and read the summary but didn't click the article cause I had no idea what KYC was, it means "know your customer". Used by banks and such for verification purposes.

National ID might help, but ultimately KYC is intrusive from MOST vendors, very few should care.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Viral posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit show how, leveraging open source and off-the-shelf software, an attacker could download a selfie of a person, edit it with generative AI tools and use the manipulated ID image to pass a KYC test.

Tutorials online show how Stable Diffusion, a free, open source image generator, can be used to create synthetic renderings of a person against any desired backdrop (e.g., a living room).

Now, yielding the best results with Stable Diffusion requires installing additional tools and extensions and procuring around a dozen images of the target.

A Reddit user going by the username harsh, who’s published a workflow for creating deepfake ID selfies, told TechCrunch that it takes around one to two days to make a convincing image.

Typically, they involve having a user take a short video of themselves turning their head, blinking their eyes or demonstrating in some other way that they’re indeed a real person.

Early last year, Jimmy Su, the chief security officer for cryptocurrency exchange Binance, told Cointelegraph that deepfake tools today are sufficient to pass liveness checks, even those that require users to perform actions like head turns in real time.

The original article contains 589 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Good.

KYC is an invasion of privacy.

If this becomes a high risk then this form of verification will be dropped. If it's going to be assessed as relatively low risk then online / webcam verification will have risk scoring penalty adjusted. KYC will still exist. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Misleading clickbait. The article says that even video is not enough for an online identity check, because advances in CGI make it ever easier to make realistic fakes. Many countries issue ID cards with NFC chips for the purpose (and have done so for years). It's a non problem.

KYC is not about online identity checks.

Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines and regulations in financial services require professionals to verify the identity, suitability, and risks involved with maintaining a business relationship with a customer. The procedures fit within the broader scope of anti-money laundering (AML) and counter terrorism financing (CTF) regulations.

KYC processes are also employed by companies of all sizes for the purpose of ensuring their proposed customers, agents, consultants, or distributors are anti-bribery compliant and are actually who they claim to be. Banks, insurers, export creditors, and other financial institutions are increasingly required to make sure that customers provide detailed due-diligence information. Initially, these regulations were imposed only on the financial institutions, but now the non-financial industry, fintech, virtual assets dealers, and even non-profit organizations are included in regulations.