Aidan McCartyCEO, Founder @ Verified ✅ | Top 25, Stanford ’19 | Forbes 30 Under 30 | 1-Click Signup for the world’s best companies

#OUTLIERS Impact Award 2019 Winner - Unum ID

Name: #OUTLIERS Impact Award 2019 Winner - Unum ID
Uploaded: 2019-11-07T04:08:44+00:00
Duration: 1 min 25 s
Channel: Aidan McCarty
Description: In this award presentation video, speakers congratulate Aidan and Liam McCarty for winning the 2019 OUTLIERS Impact Award for their work with Unum ID…

7 Nov 2019 · 1 min

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1:25

In this award presentation video, speakers congratulate Aidan and Liam McCarty for winning the 2019 OUTLIERS Impact Award for their work with Unum ID. The discussion centers on Unum ID’s novel approach to online identity: storing all personal identity data exclusively on the user’s device, with no central database, thereby eliminating the need for passwords, usernames, and two‑step verification. The speakers argue that this model simplifies authentication for users and dramatically reduces the cost and difficulty for organizations to verify identities. They highlight the urgent problem of massive fake‑account creation—citing Facebook’s removal of three billion fake accounts in a single quarter—and present Unum ID’s technology as a tool to protect democracy in the 2020 election cycle by preventing bots, misinformation, and fraudulent petitions. The video ends with congratulatory remarks and well‑wishes for the founders.

Chapters

I got Aidan and Liam McCarty now. Now you guys just won the award, I would say the Impact Award, probably the biggest award of the night.
So what am I— is a single online identity that ties to a single offline human? That sounds very obvious. Of course you want that. But online identity is not like that today. It's a collection of lots of different accounts controlled by usernames and passwords and two-step verification logins, all kinds of inconvenient things, and they often aren't consistent. The flip side of that is it's very expensive for organizations to verify your identity. It's hard to know whether it's actually you on the internet.
So our guarantee to you is that we're storing your information only on your device. You can read it directly in our privacy policy. There's no database here. We're not storing any personal information on our servers. That's a guarantee.
Obviously, from the user perspective, passwords, usernames, two-step verification, these are all very annoying. They're time-wasting, they're inconvenient, and they're not as secure as you think they are.
And the first use case we actually have for this technology and why we're holding this award right now is to secure our democracy against bots and meddling for 2020. This is a massive problem of fake accounts online, both on social media and when doing things like signing a petition, contacting an elected official, contacting a federal agency.
Facebook removed 3 billion fake accounts in the first quarter of this year. 3 billion fake accounts. So it's extremely easy to make fake accounts if you don't have identity verification. What we're providing is a way to prevent that, to say, okay, now you actually have to be a real person in order to do this. And that stops things like fake news. It stops things like these bot networks that spread misinformation.
Well, congratulations again, Aidan and Liam McCarty. You guys are awesome and much success in the future. Future. Thank you so much. Unam-Ide.