Being True to Your Selfie – GDI New York 2024 Roundup

Trust, verification, and authentication were recurring themes at GDI’s recent New York City conference. And all the while, the threat of AI was lurking in the background, and the foreground, of many of the debates and discussions at the conference – whether they were taking place on the stage, around the tables, or on the conference floor during the breaks.

The conference heard that many companies were turning to selfie-led verification techniques, often coupled with image checking against officially held photo-ID records such as passports and driving licences.

Among those companies placing a degree of trust in the selfie verification was Archer, who felt that the use of selfies was helping to keep bad actors out of the platform with Chief Product Officer Marcus Lofthouse wondering whether this effective but seemingly small step had also highlighted a difference between gay and straight communities. Stepping out of the shadows and providing a selfie might just be a more significant step for some in the gay community.

Jack Chamberlain Jigsaw’s Engineering Manager was also a fan of the selfie verification option but added that Jigsaw still employed manual verification for anything flagged as potentially suspicious.  Of course, many suggested that the ‘flagging’ of suspicious content could also be accomplished by harnessing AI – leading to a situation where an AI tool was being asked to detect false profiles and selfies created by an AI tool.

However, consensus affirmed the need for dating apps to prioritize safety. Scott Bright, an expert in risk and fraud and Founder and CEO of BrightCheck went one step further. He pointed out the inadequacy of traditional verification methods against the complex rise in romance scams. Brightcheck leads with AI to identify fraudsters, tackling 2023’s record scam levels within dating apps.

That safe environment isn’t always easy to build and to protect, and a panel chaired by the Online Dating and Discovery Association heard how legislation and regulation often fell behind the real world and was often too broad in its scope to best serve a particular market segment.

Of course, as a preventative measure, legislation usually lags behind as new methods and types of crime as the emerge or become enabled by technology. The conference heard about the impact of romance scams from Nicole Drew, Founder and CEO of Rater, an app focused firmly on creating a safe dating environment.

Romance scams are often described as a crime of embarrassment, and many times go unreported. The conference heard that dating app companies need to work together to ensure that such crimes are always reported, not just to the police but also to other app providers and users so that scammer profiles get removed and vulnerable people are not exposed.

The apps using a paid-for only model felt they had some protection from bad actors, as scammers typically did not want to pay for access; but payment alone is not a sufficient barrier. Properly authenticated verification tools, and the use of live selfies with simultaneous background checks against official sources provided the strongest scalable protection available today. 

Making sure your users are exactly who they say they are is key to creating a trusted environment.  Being true to your selfie, so to speak, is a good way to show you are the person who you claim to be – and that must be the safest starting point for the dating industry.