We have all experienced a growing reliance on remote services and digital technology that was sped up by the pandemic. From electronic payments to mobile orders for groceries to telehealth visits, our comfort level with taking care of business from behind a screen has increased significantly.
However, identity fraud and identity theft are at all-time highs and cybersecurity hacks are constantly in the news, from SITA’s Passenger Service System (PSS) in March to this month’s hack of the Colonial Pipeline which shut down the largest fuel pipeline to the East Coast of the United States. Single points of attack are always tempting to hackers and leave millions of people to deal with the resulting identity theft for years to come.
Additionally, the New York Times reported that for online privacy alone, states proposed 27 bills in 2021, up from two in 2018, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Apple recently reported that it stopped more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2020 and rejected over 150K app submissions last year for violating privacy guidelines. This news comes just as the company introduced new notifications to their products to provide more transparency for people to more easily and proactively manage their privacy settings. The results speak for themselves with only 4% of users opting into ad tracking.
It’s clear that there is a legitimate need and demand for technologies that provide people with more control and security.
Why Acuant and Airside Partnered
Airside and Acuant have been working together for some time and we think good planning and thoughtful design can mitigate or eliminate these kinds of risks. Our partnership has enabled Airside to bring a solution to the market that helps address these risks and puts consumers in control of the technology they choose to trust.
We’ve all embedded new technology into our lives that allows us to order, pay, sign up and schedule our activities and services before we arrive at a location. However, too often the need for robust, accurate identity proofing is overlooked. Both Acuant and Airside protect verified consumer data by never storing personal information and ensuring data is exchanged securely and is always encrypted. Individuals and organizations can also trust their information is source-verified to the correct individual and cannot be altered or forged.
The Airside Digital Identity App leverages Acuant’s robust identity verification technology so people can prove that they are who they claim to be by verifying that their documents, such as passports, driver’s licenses or national IDs, are not fraudulent. Specifically, this means that we verify the authenticity of your government-issued ID and utilize facial recognition with anti-spoofing techniques for more fraud prevention. We check IDs against issuing agencies or other authoritative sources while running 50+ forensic tests in seconds. Utilizing Acuant’s continuously updated global document library of over 6,500 unique identity documents from over 200 countries means we provide the best global coverage.
Airside enables people with a single, biometric verified enrollment of documents on their phones that can be used, re-used and self-managed with ease and peace-of-mind, always on their terms. Airside and Acuant protect verified personal data by never storing personal information and always ensuring data is exchanged securely.
Private Digital Identity is Here; The Future is Now
Last year, Gartner reported that 65% of the world’s population will have its personal information covered by new privacy requirements by 2023, signaling that, like U.S. states and Apple have shown, there’s a larger shift in technology toward products and services with privacy at their core. This takes us back to why we formed our partnership and our joint belief in putting consumers in control and building secure, privacy-first solutions that can be trusted by all. Our years of success have shown that privacy and security don’t have to come at the expense of convenience. We’ve put people in the center of our partnership to provide everyone with data privacy today.
The new Airside Digital Identity App can be used for many use cases and is available to download for free in the Apple App Store, and will soon be available in the Google Play Store.
For more information: Read our press release!
