Argentina
Half-a-million people in Argentina have verified their Worldcoin Foundation digital identity at one of the foundation’s Orb iris biometrics scanners – equal to one percent of the nation’s population.
“Almost 3 million” individuals worldwide have verified their World ID internet passport using an Orb, according to the organisation.
The foundation says the passport works with Shopify, Telegram, Minecraft and Reddit. World ID holders also can claim regularly distributed grants of cybercurrency WLD tokens, where national regulations allow. Okta has also added Worldcoin authentication to the Auth0 marketplace.
Chile’s adoption rate reportedly is 1.5 percent and Portugal’s is 2.5 percent, as per Biometric Update.
Global
A new survey shows an increase in identity fraud associated with digital nomads, or people working on the go. The most affected industries are Financial Services and Insurance, according to the data from Regula.
Eighty percent of business decision makers directly associate the digital nomad movement with identity fraud, saying that it is increasing the number of forged or counterfeited documents organizations find during verification. The average growth in identity document fraud is stated to be 14 percent; however, in the Insurance industry it is 22 percent, and in the Financial and Banking Services it is nearly 19 percent.
According to the survey’s results, the number of foreign document verification cases in all parts of the world has grown by an average of 21 percent since the summer of 2021. It’s highest in the US and UAE: these countries are experiencing a 25 percent increase. As for industries, Insurance appears to be dealing with the majority of foreign IDs (+27 percent compared to summer 2021), followed by Financial and Banking Services (+25 percent).
Global
Socure has launched what it said is the industry’s first integrated, internally developed, identity fraud solution suite that fuses “personal identifiable information (PII) validated by thousands of data sources, real-time network and anomaly detection, with digital and behavioural risk signals for an instant and near 100 percent accurate identity fraud decision” in less than 150 milliseconds with five nines of uptime availability.
Socure’s Sigma Fraud suite assesses a consumer’s historic behavioural patterns across institutions, geographies, and timeframes to spot anomalies that indicate risk of theft or tampering at the entity level.
United Kingdom
UK-based rental data reporter CreditLadder has enabled digital identity app Digital ID Connect’s users to report their rental payments to credit agencies. The partnership sees users seamlessly report their rent payments into four main credit agencies.
CreditLadder helps make their payments appear on credit files, allowing lenders to see that on-time rent payments have been made. These payments can also help improve a tenant’s credit score – much like a homeowner can benefit from on-time mortgage payments.
Renters can sign up to CreditLadder using any one of the Digital ID apps within the Digital ID Connect network to securely provide personal details, prove age, and identity. Users then provide details of their bank account, rent amount, and tenancy information, enabling CreditLadder to capture and track rental payments automatically, via Open Banking.
Officials from Yoti, the company that built Digital ID Connect’s network, said that the vision for Digital ID Connect is to provide faster and more secure ways for people to share their information with valued services that need identity or age verification.
Ireland
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Ireland has set a target of having 80 percent of eligible citizens using MyGovID by 2030. MyGovID provides a single digital identity for all government bodies in Ireland, using Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory. Registration requires the submission of a biometric facial image. As of October 2023, 2.3 million citizens had registered, putting the programme on pace to achieve its goals.
Africa
The African Union (AU) has published a blueprint which is expected to ramp up the expansion of legal and digital ID in Africa and ensure that citizens “easily and securely access the public and private services they need, when the need them, and independently of their location.”
The AU’s framework doesn’t call for a unified continent-wide digital ID system, but proposes a template for how existing systems in different countries can function in an interoperable manner as part of the push towards stronger continental integration and economic prosperity. It will also support inclusion and “participation in the wider digital economy and society and allow services to operate with greater trust and certainty.”
Global
The use of reusable digital identities addresses the need for building “safer, prosperous, and economically inclusive societies, while rebuilding trust among businesses, governments, and citizens,” according to Ricardo Amper, founder and CEO of Incode Technologies, in discussions with attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“Reusable digital identities promote full social participation in the economy, improve access to jobs, and greatly reduce fraud in public and private interactions, resulting in lower business operation costs and increased trust among businesses, governments, and individuals,” noted Amper.
United States
A new report from the US National Academies of Sciences suggests that the White House should consider issuing an Executive Order outlining how federal agencies should use facial recognition technology (FRT) and recommends that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outline standards and minimum requirements for FRT depending on the application area, via Find Biometrics.
United States
Root Protocol, a digital identity service aiming to unify access to Web3 platforms, has raised $10 million across two seed rounds.
The funding rounds, which gave Root a $100 million valuation, were led by Animoca Brands and included contributions from a slew of other notable investors, including Signum Capital, Ankr Network, CMS Holdings and angel investors Tekin Salimi and Meltem Demirors.
Root Protocol is building a Web3 operating system that will serve as a digital identity aggregator, becoming “a one-stop station for all things decentralised identity” to make accessing different Web3 platforms a more seamless process, according to an announcement.
Czech Republic
The Czech mobile app eDoklady has officially become operational as of Saturday, January 20, ushering in a new era of identity verification through electronic ID cards. Now accessible on Google Play and the App Store, the app allows Czech citizens to download their electronic ID to their smartphones, instead of using traditional plastic cards.
Starting immediately, central authorities such as government ministries, the Czech Telecommunications Office, the Czech Statistical Office, and the Office for Cyber Security will recognise and accept the new form of electronic ID. Selected municipalities will also adopt the new app on a voluntary basis.
Every citizen of the Czech Republic can now download the eDoklady application and activate their ID card via a central Citizen’s Internet Portal (Portál občana). This innovation streamlines identity verification processes, enabling citizens to manage their data efficiently when interacting with the state, eliminating the need for cumbersome paperwork.
