Blockchain... The Answer is BLOCKCHAIN: Looking at Deepfakes and Decentralized Identity

New Realities

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This is going to be the first of hopefully many posts that pop up on my feed every so often that tries to hypothesize how a blockchain protocol could solve a current/new issue in the world. I don't know about you, but I find myself more and more looking at the world around me and periodically getting frustrated that blockchain isn't more a part of the conversation. And every so often, a major issue will suddenly appear where I holler at the newsfeed or media screen “It's BLOCKCHAIN you fool!” whenever someone is trying to find a solution.

We already know that blockchain is starting to usurp the traditional notions and structures of a few marked industries, namely banking and information. The immutable and decentralized blockchain has already begun to heighten security, reduce fees, speed up transactions, maintain proper identification, and create an autonomous viable alternative to corporate control.

And off of that premise, we’re starting to see adopters take on these emergent technologies and apply them to what they feel are logical applications and potentially competitive enough to take on a good chunk of their respective markets. These include gambling, lending, exchanging, and marketing all types of data to name a few.

But there will be moments when cryptos are created not just for natural market growth and entrepreneurs staking out new opportunities, but when new solutions are direly needed.

I think I just stumbled across one that the blockchain must react to.

Deepfakes and Artificial Pornography

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To give credit, I came across this story in a recent episode of Phillip de Franco (who would make a great Steemian by the way). He covered the technology and popular use of Deepfakes: a program that allows you to render anyones face onto another’s body in video. Splicing faces onto photos has been an age-old offense but this rendering technology would allow you to take someone’s face… and put it onto a pornstar’s body.

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And this is exactly was is happening.

I won’t put up any risqué pictures here to keep it not-NSFW and once you’re in an empty room at home, I’d recommend looking at the Deepfakes subreddit to get a better sense of the somewhat underground culture growing around this.

But it’s exactly that, a growing range of fake pornography covering many mainstream actresses and the very rare male. It’s still at the beginning stages of this tech and much of it is blatantly shoddy. Still, you can imagine all the diverse use-cases of this in the modern world and how a particularly creative/deranged/desperate mind might take it too far.

• Just a sample. Source

The ‘truth’ becomes quite distorted here and there will soon come an environment where we must train ourselves to distrust anything we experience until it is verifiable. In the case of Deepfakes and why I immediately thought of blockchain was due to the issue of identity verification.

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The current state of blockchain-based identity

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Deepfakes brings the perpetration of identity theft to a whole new level. It’s one thing to be able to steal another’s social security, credit cards, and even personal data, but to be able to manipulate the public’s perception of you and your character is entirely different. Immutable ledgers linked into unique aspects of a person is one really promising aspect of DAOs and applications of blockchain, even without the use of some token/crypto issuance. It’s quite apparent that we need a system that verify’s a person’s personhood beyond just our individual sensorial acknowledgement.

Because the crime can be done in a number of ways. I’ve previously had someone get into my email account and send off slanderous activity to my contacts. How would the recipient know that it is indeed me? Or if someone photoshopped a text of mine or a false image. How would anyone prove/disprove my authenticity? In the same way financial transactions are achieved through a multi-varied consensus to prevent fraud, an identity could be verified using a host of both typical and nonconventional techniques.

• Source: Civic

Civic is a blockchain/token designed to do just that, using decentralized ledgers to verify one’s various accounts and identity. They’re making it useful for personal banking, nationality, medical records, and even social interactions. I’m most curious about that last one, how authenticated accounts interact and form an ongoing trail of immutable data.

And this goes back to the practice of deepfakes. One solution route is to always keep track of interactions and affiliations. Anonymous uploads would be futile in the wake of this and links to data would mean any angry ex-boyfriend would be inextricably linked to the incident. I for one can very curious how this aspect of blockchain will develop in the future.

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If you’re interested in how other companies are tackling this very issue, I recommend looking at this somewhat outdated but still generally informative article.

What do you think? Can you imagine a future where we really need to protect our identities? Let me know