In an era marked by the increasing adoption of online identity verification within government and banking services, a French startup company ShareID is making its debut. What sets it apart is its groundbreaking approach to protecting user privacy. Unlike the conventional methods that entail the retention of personal data, its solution ushers in a new era of security.
Eliana Daboul, spokesperson for ShareID, describes the company as an “Authentication-as-a-Service solution linked to government-issued IDs.” What sets ShareID apart is its commitment to not storing any personal data. Instead, users are asked to submit a video demonstrating their “liveness,” ensuring that they are genuinely present in front of their phone’s camera and a picture of their government ID. The company doesn’t store this information but retains it in memory on its servers briefly. It then creates a unique hash (an ID) and promptly erases the data.
Unlike ShareID, other companies in this field take a different approach. For instance, in the United States, ID.me, which partners with the government, holds onto biometric data, including selfies, for up to three years. Likewise, CLEAR, another biometric security company, retains a substantial amount of personal information for an extended duration.
ShareID’s CEO, Sara Sebti, emphasizes that their goal is to keep as little information as possible and for the shortest duration necessary. “We issue reusable identities to our users, we get rid of all the personal data that we captured. We only generate this homomorphic hash and use it to re-authenticate the person when they return,” Sebti explains. This approach employs an encryption technique that creates a unique value from the data, making it impossible to reverse-engineer to retrieve the original data.
