Protecting Authenticity in the Age of AI with not.bot

The internet is full of catfish, fake accounts, deepfakes, and scammers who are impersonating others. For instance, studies show that foreign actors distribute misleading images, deepfakes, and misinformation to influence American citizens and even interfere with US elections. In particular, Russia is known for maintaining “troll farms” that seek to sow confusion and heighten tensions in the US.

 

Technologies exist that websites can use to collect each user’s personal information as a way to verify that the user is human, but these systems create new problems. When people get too used to sharing their government-issued ID and selfie videos with every website, eventually they’re going to accidentally give that information to a malicious site. And even among legitimate sites, eventually one of them will be hacked and that personal data leaked out onto the internet for anyone to use in identity theft and deepfake attacks. These technologies will also soon be defeated by AI when the government ID and selfie video can be entirely faked.

 

“Today’s internet is a sea of deception,” Griggs says. “The solution is to create a trustworthy ecosystem where people can establish their identity and put their seal of authenticity on their content. That’s what not.bot does.”

 

The not.bot solution, focused on privacy

According to Griggs, not.bot establishes the real human identity using digitally-signed passports. (Currently, the platform is limited to the US only.)

 

Users scan the Near Field Communication (NFC) microchip embedded in their passports, which contains encrypted data and a digital signature from the US State Department that’s nearly impossible to forge. Then, not.bot decrypts the data, verifies the digital signature to assure the integrity of the data. 

 

Quite simply, this chip-based system means fake passports or other simulations can’t slip through. This is unlike systems that use photographs of people’s IDs, which can be fooled.

 

“To be clear, we do not harvest any data about our users,” Griggs says. “We only save your data on your own phone. We do not store your passport information.”

 

How to use not.bot

Whenever someone generates content and wants to flag it as genuine, they can affix their own personal not.bot “sticker” to the photo, video, document, or other post. They include in the sticker a message clearly identifying the content that is to be signed with that sticker. Anyone receiving that content can scan the sticker and verify the message matches the content to verify its authenticity.  Most stickers people will see are QR codes that can only be scanned by the not.bot app.  Not.bot stickers can be used on any website or app where you can upload an image, which is essentially everywhere on the internet today.

 

Users can create digital stickers under multiple aliases. Only the user knows which aliases belong to them. No one else can tell that two aliases belong to the same person – not even Julia Social, the company behind not.bot. This protection is useful not only because it helps thwart tracking but also because it allows people to create aliases appropriate for their participation in different communities.

 

“For instance, you could keep a professional alias for work-related posts and another for engaging with communities related to your hobbies,” Griggs explains. “Yet another alias would enable you to comment on public forums without involving your professional or personal personas.”

 

The aliases cannot be bought, sold, or otherwise transferred to others, since using any of them requires the private cryptographic keys stored on the person’s device.

 

“We designed it that way to thwart efforts by scammers to buy an alias,” Griggs explains. “To get access to create stickers with an alias that is not theirs, they would have to convince someone to let them have all of their aliases. And at any time, the rightful owner can use our recovery feature to get them back. These barriers mean it would be impractical for not.bot stickers to be outsourced or mass produced.”

 

This rigorous digital identity verification system enables the internet to shift toward an ecosystem that protects users’ privacy and shields them from bad actors.

 

Real-world examples

“When real internet users’ can be clearly identified as human, it becomes easy to spot the automated scams, fake content and deepfakes,” Griggs explains. “They’re the ones who don’t have a not.bot sticker. Our stickers can also help users find each other and create a trusted network of contacts.”

 

With not.bot stickers, for instance, influencers can reassure their viewers that they are following a real person. They can also protect their identities from being stolen by wannabes or repurposed into unauthorized deepfakes. Community moderators would also benefit, since they could easily spot spam and remove it.

 

There are also important use cases for businesses. Attaching sticker-based signatures from verified human representatives to outbound communications with the sign of a verified human representative would help customers spot phishing attempts, which reduces the risk of fraud and data theft.

 

The future of the internet is human

Griggs emphasizes that not.bot isn’t just an app. Instead, it’s a movement.

“With each additional user, we take the internet back for real human beings just a little bit more,” he says. “It’s about making the internet safe again and reestablishing trust. With not.bot, the internet can belong to real people again.”