Mobile Phone Data: The Key to Identity Verification

Ever hear anyone say, “My phone is my life!” In the people data industry, we tend to agree. To us, a phone’s value is not determined by its make and model rather the data that it holds. Smartphones today are mobile offices and the key to people’s social lives, possessing both our professional and private data.

In the world of people data, not all data is made equal. Data providers place a premium value on data points that connect different records to a single person, such as mobile numbers.  For example, if I conduct a person search using a phone number, that number may be associated with a Facebook account and a professional email address, each of which may be connected to a lot of relevant personal and professional data. As a result, mobile data’s position at the center of the professional-personal nexus makes it particularly valuable. At Pipl, we recognize the value of mobile data by ensuring that our  Premium subscription API users have access to wide array of mobile data, the crème de la crème of people data.

Companies outside the people data space, like Google, have also realized the importance of a mobile device for personal authentication. That is why they have been badgering each of us for our phone numbers ever since, when someone logs into Gmail.

Vetting a SIM card is also no longer an easy task – as governments have caught on the importance of being able to identify a mobile phone user’s identity. Government initiatives across the globe have been introduced to identify mobile phone users, with SIM purchases and registration typically requiring at least a single form of photo identification from buyers.

Selfie Authentication

Among businesses it’s no longer just the techies who are using your phone in place of other forms of ID. The Netherlands-based bank ABN AMRO recently upped the ante by introducing the Kardashian-esque concept of opening a new bank account with a selfie a token payment transfer and a scan of a national ID document. You could call it the technology that broke the banking system.

ABN AMRO could make opening an account even more frictionless and meet Dutch KYC requirements by just asking a customer for a selfie and then utilizing third-party people data.

Here is hypothetically how it could work:

• A user shares the image using MMS, WhatsApp or email.
• The phone number and/or email is reverse-searched and leveraged against the People Data API running in the background while AML systems cross-reference data against tens of thousands of sources to authenticate the user’s credentials.
• The trail of data and identification required to obtain the SIMcard as well as location/address data and profession or income are compared for discrepancies.
• The image acts as a complementary piece of data that can then be reversed-searched (see https://www.tineye.com/) or compared against social media thumbnails.
• Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) is another type of data that can be pulled from an image. Every time you take a photo on digital device, whether it’s a digital camera, webcam or mobile device, embedded data is created too, known as EXIF data. This data type contains unique identifiers, shutter, exposure and other photographic information. Algorithms exist to extract this data and track pictures down to public sites like Flickr that potentially contain a wealth of information about a person.

Alternative Identification for Emerging Markets

You may not be the type of person to open a bank account with a selfie but the commercial potential of mobile goes far beyond that. Phone data could hold the potential to unlock emerging markets and resolve many of the problems developing countries face in verifying the identities of citizens and the recipients of business services.  Rural areas in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South and East Asia may lack basic sanitation, public facilities and most forms of identification but rarely do individuals in these areas lack cellphones. In fact, the graph below from the Pew Research Center illustrates how phone ownership in the Africa rivals that of the U.S.

A Stanford Business School article describes the negative impact of identity fraud on food rations, as well as the challenges and expenses India is facing in introducing new biometric systems to identify citizens of the subcontinent. However, there may be more cost-effective identity solutions than analyzing biometric results. A study by MIT scientists published in the scientific journal Nature examined the GPS coordinate data from 1.5 million people’s mobile phones and found that it could be used to correctly identify the phone owner 95 percent of the time of the people taking part.  Travel patterns are so unique to a person that only 4 data points could correctly identify 95% of the sample as opposed to the 12 unique data points needed to identify a finger print. Combined with all the other people data that can be found with phone numbers, it’s possible that smartphones could become the most important tool for fraud prevention in the 21st century. For more information on this topic I also recommend reading Online Identity and the Digital Economy of Tomorrow.