A library of snippets
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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is today launching the Consumer Data Right Register and Accreditation Application Platform (RAAP) to allow banks and fintech businesses to become accredited data recipients, representing another major step towards the launch of the Government’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) regime.
From ACCC launches Consumer Data Right platform | Treasury Ministers:
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We, along with the Law Society, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) and the Chartered Institute for Legal Executives (CILEx), believe that cryptographic and biometric checking of identity, using microchip-enabled passports or identity cards, might present a new, robust and convenient answer to the need to maintain social distancing while verifying an applicant’s identity.
From Facing up to the digital identity challenge – HM Land Registry:
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Wait, what happened to gov.verify? Why can’t they use the UK government’s digital identity service?
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‘Sign Your Mortgage Deed’ makes use of GOV.UK Verify, enabling identity to be verified and mortgage deeds to be digitally signed.
From Flexible digital services, fit for the future – HM Land Registry:
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At that time, we were told the t
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Conveyancers will still have a role to play in identity verification as they will continue to undertake the identity checks that they currently do as part of their due diligence.
From Using GOV.UK Verify for the first digital mortgage – HM Land Registry:
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Evidence indicates this to be a more reliable and secure identity check than visual passport or other identity document checks.
From Facing up to the digital identity challenge – HM Land Registry:
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a basket of digital stable currencies in RMB, Japanese yen, South Korean won and Hong Kong dollar, and try to apply it to cross-border trade payment first in the regulatory sandbox ; establish an electronic wallet reserve custody system to ensure the safety of funds
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That begs a question that has been seen as controversial — are we entering a post-dollar world? It might seem a straw-man question, given that more than 60 per cent of the world’s currency reserves are in dollars, which are also used for the vast majority of global commerce. The US Federal Reserve’s recent bolstering of dollar markets outside of the US, as a response to the coronavirus crisis, has given a further boost to global dollar dominance.
From We may be heading towards a post-dollar world | Financial Times:
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China, Russia and other emerging market countries (as well as some rich nations such as Germany) would love to move away from dollar dominance, they have no real alternatives. This desire is especially sharp in a world of increasingly weaponised finance.
From We may be heading towards a post-dollar world | Financial Times:
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China has been a big buyer of gold recently, as a hedge against the value of its dollar holdings. It is also testing its own digital currency regime, the e-RMB, becoming the first sovereign nation to roll out a central bank-backed cryptocurrency. One can imagine that would be easy to deploy throughout the orbit of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as an attractive alternative for countries and businesses that want to trade with one another without having to use dollars to hedge exchange-rate risk.
From We may be heading towards a post-dollar world | Financial Times:
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China has been a big buyer of gold recently, as a hedge against the value of its dollar holdings. It is also testing its own digital currency regime, the e-RMB, becoming the first sovereign nation to roll out a central bank-backed cryptocurrency. One can imagine that would be easy to deploy throughout the orbit of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as an attractive alternative for countries and businesses that want to trade with one another without having to use dollars to hedge exchange-rate risk.
From We may be heading towards a post-dollar world | Financial Times:
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DEEPFAKES would require anyone creating a piece of synthetic media imitating a person to disclose that the video is altered or generated, using “irremovable digital watermarks, as well as textual descriptions.” Failing to do so will be a crime.
From DEEPFAKES Accountability Act would impose unenforceable rules — but it’s a start | TechCrunch:
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one in 10 people were refused by shops when trying to pay for items with cash,
From Which? calls on UK Government to prevent collapse of cash:
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Axa Venture Partners was the lead investor in the $13.5m funding round for D-ID, an Israeli startup developing technology that can mask and blur faces, anonymising images and video.
In an era where Covid-19 is ramping up surveillance, de-identification tech like this will increasingly be in demand,
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D-ID, which stands for de-identification, is a pretty straightforward service that’s masking some highly involved and very advanced technology to blur digital images so they can’t be cross-referenced to determine someone’s identity.
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A central problem with social media discourse is, in my opinion, the rise of the bots. You can see the magnitude of the problem in the current crisis, where researchers found that bots may account for around half of the Twitter accounts discussing covid-19! Many of those accounts were created quite recently and have been amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice and conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus while pushing to “reopen America”.
The problem is now quite serious. There are vast armies of bots out there trying to spread disinformation, foment division and fracture communities. Elections and the democratic process itself are under attack. It almost makes me nostalgic for the good old days when hackers were just trying to steal credit card numbers instead of trying to interfere with elections!
This came up in my “identity stroll” with Sudan Sethuramalingam, Head of Scaled Operation at Twitter. I was asking him about the threats to online content integrity (and what kind of actions we might take to counter them). He has a background in heavy duty know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) with banks as well as social media platforms, so he really understands the magnitude of the problem. We were discussing the complexity of managing social media content and algorithms give the vast scale of the networks and their importance to society.
After listening to him, I reflected that it is probably best to focus on the issue of the bots rather than the content, which seems to me to be impossible to police. If people could just set their social media feeds to ignore content from bots, we might improve the quality of the conversation there significantly. So maybe that’s where we should focus: not trying to flag up contents, but flagging up the users so that social media users can ignore them.
The way forward is surely not for Twitter et al to try and figure out who is a disinformation bot and whether they should be banned (after all, there are plenty of good bots out there) but for Twitter et al to give their users the information they need to make a choice. Why can’t I tell Twitter that I only want to see tweets from real people that can be identified? I don’t want to know the identities — it’s none of my business who a person actually is and it’s none of Twitter’s business either — I just want to know if I’m following a person or not! I know that I’m on the right track here, by the way, because noted entrepreneur Elon Musk agrees with this prescription, having reportedly told Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter that “I think it would be helpful to differentiate’ between real and fake users… Is this a real person or is this a bot net or a sort of troll army or something like that?”.
If we could just go so far as to tell real people from fake people, we’d be well on the way to solving the problem. Fortunately, this is where INSTINCT can make a difference, so I’m very happy to be here helping Au10tix to launch a product that will make a real difference in the fight against the fake people.
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Users sign up with their existing Facebook account and perhaps a verified phone number as well. Facebook assesses their profile and only allows them in if they meet a threshold of legitimacy, such as having 15 friends or more and having joined Facebook more than a few months ago.
From Facebook’s Anonymous App Could Kill Trolls With Secret Identity | TechCrunch:
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The problem with this is that Facebook knows who you are.
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