D-ID Teams Up with Toppan to Sell De-identification Tech in Asian Market

The privacy protection specialist D-ID has joined forces with Toppan Printing in an effort to boost its sales in the Asian market. Toppan will specifically be selling D-ID’s de-identification platform to third parties in Japan and ASEAN member nations, and expects to generate $9.1 million in sales within the next two years.

D-ID’s de-identification tech is designed to thwart facial recognition, and essentially scrubs biometric identifiers from videos and photo images. The new material is still recognizable to the human eye, but will not generate a match when run through a facial recognition algorithm, which allows companies to process the data while remaining compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR and Japan’s APPI.  

“More than 80% of data traffic is video, and much of that includes identifiable facial images,” explained D-ID Co-founder and CEO Gil Perry. “Businesses are desperately seeking solutions to anonymize this data so they can use it commercially while still ensuring customer privacy.”

To that end, Toppan has integrated D-ID’s tech to create a new de-identification service for the Asian market. Toppan plans to offer the service to customers in a range of different industries, including healthcare, finance, tourism, and public infrastructure.  

“This partnership allows us to ensure the protection of personal privacy by linking facial de-identification services with our various customer solutions, and provides protection against data breaches and leaks of personally identifiable information,” said Toppan Senior General Manager Minoru Saito. “With our joint offering, Toppan and D-ID will allow companies to ensure that the privacy of customers and employees is properly protected.”

D-ID released its first facial recognition jammer back in 2018, just a few months after receiving $4 million in seed funding. The Israeli startup has since taken its concept a step further with the debut of a Smart Anonymization solution that replaces facial images with AI-generated substitutes.  

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November 19, 2019 – by Eric Weiss