Jumio Warns About Bias and Credential Stuffing in 2021 Identity Predictions

Jumio has released a series of predictions for the identity verification industry in 2021. The company noted that fraud rates were up 60 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, and expects that trend to continue into the next year since people are still doing much of their shopping online.

With that in mind, Jumio believes that businesses and government agencies will increasingly turn to document-based forms of identity verification, such as those that compare a selfie to the image on a photo ID. Biometric authentication will also help guard against credential stuffing, which is expected to be the biggest cybersecurity threat in 2021 after 36 billion records were exposed in breaches in 2020. As it stands, 71 percent of accounts are still secured with a password that is used elsewhere, which only creates more urgency for organizations that are looking to protect their business and their customers.

Jumio’s other major prediction concerns the performance of biometric algorithms, especially when it comes to issues of race, age, and gender bias. According to an MIT analysis of datasets used to train facial recognition tech, 77 percent of the images in those databases were male, while a full 83 percent were white. Customers that want to provide better service (and avoid legal exposure) will request solutions that mitigate that bias, which will in turn force providers to take deliberate steps to address the imbalance and meet that demand.

That shift will be mirrored at the regulatory level. Jumio suggested that state and federal legislators will pass more data protection laws (such as the Improving Digital Identity Act) to prevent companies from sharing personal data without explicit consent. Meanwhile, standards bodies like the NIST will create new performance guidelines that take bias and other issues into account.

Jumio went on to predict that the conversation around online voting will start to intensify ahead of the US election in 2024, and that age verification will become a bigger priority for businesses that will be asked to be more accountable for the people on their platforms. Most notably, businesses that offer age-restricted goods and content will need to move beyond self-reporting to make sure that customers accessing that material are legally old enough to do so.

Finally, Jumio closed with a warning about future developments in cybercrime. While AI is a powerful tool in the fight against fraud, it can just as easily be used for malicious purposes, as in the case of automated and deepfake attacks. Companies will need to work to stay ahead of the curve and deliver solutions that can handle increasingly sophisticated forms of fraud.   

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January 4, 2020 – by Eric Weiss