We were told never to get into a stranger’s car. Yet millions of us do it every day.
The rules most people grew up with (“don’t talk to strangers online”, “never open the door to someone you don’t know”) have been dismantled by the platforms we now use without thinking. Sharing economy platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Marketplace, and DoorDash run entirely on the assumption that strangers can be trusted at scale.
“We live in a generation that buys everything online,” said Yair Tal, CEO of AU10TIX. The Israeli identity verification helps organizations confirm that a person is who they claim to be when opening accounts, making transactions, or accessing services online. “We trust people that we don’t know. We go on a car share ride in the middle of the night in a place that you would never go into someone else’s car. This is where we live today.”
The question AU10TIX answers is simple: how do you know the person on the other side of the screen is who they say they are?
Before digital onboarding was a mainstream category, Tal was Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise at Payoneer, trying to serve users in places where conventional verification breaks down. “‘The address is the house near the tree behind the garden’,” Tal recalled. “This is the home address. How do you validate that this is the right person?”
That problem of having to verify identity across emerging markets, for unbanked freelancers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan who needed access to global platforms, forced AU10TIX to build systems that Western banks never had to imagine. That early stress-testing became the architectural foundation for what the company does today.
Deepfakes Broke Identity - At Scale
The threat landscape, however, has changed faster than most anticipated. For most of identity verification’s history, fraud was fundamentally an individual problem. The scale was manageable, and the detection logic was straightforward: check the document, match the face. Deepfakes and AI-generated identities broke that model entirely. What was once a manual, one-at-a-time problem is now industrial.
“If we see for a specific company that there’s payments going into APAC of about 20,000 fake IDs in a day, we need to block them,” Tal said. “We’re not talking anymore about the individual. We’re talking about the massive scale of applications that companies are seeing — and it’s so easy to create them with deepfake.”
Detection can no longer happen at the document level alone, and AU10TIX’s automation-first architecture is designed precisely for this volume.
Privacy vs. Security: “The Two Number Ones”
Complicating matters further is the regulatory environment, which is pulling companies in two directions simultaneously. Governments are demanding stricter identity verification while also tightening privacy protections, creating what Tal calls a structural conflict with no easy resolution. “It is not that you can say that my highest priority is privacy and the second priority is security,” he said. “Both of them are your first priority.”
The practical answer AU10TIX has arrived at is to collect only what the decision requires. A platform that needs to restrict under-18 purchases doesn’t need a user’s address, employment history, or document number. It needs one binary answer.
The pub bouncer, Tal argued, doesn’t care where you live or what you do for work. He needs to know if you’re allowed to order that beer.
The stakes of getting this wrong are no longer abstract. Companies that have failed at the identity layer haven’t just faced regulatory fines. They’ve put people in physical danger. “We recently saw companies that lost their data, their reputation, their customers,” Tal said. “They took the wrong people into their cars. People stayed in the wrong apartments.” The sharing economy’s entire value proposition - that a stranger’s home or car can be trusted - collapses the moment that verification layer fails.
The next ‘frontier’ is digital government IDs and QR-code-based national verification, to the delight or horror of everyone. The promise is that they will introduce stronger source-level authentication, but new fragmentation challenges for companies operating across borders. Critics will be skeptical of government or private company attempts to collect, store, or exploit personal information.
The infrastructure will keep evolving, but the principle remains fixed. “The digital identity is the only way for us to keep the trust going,” Tal concluded. Whether companies, governments, and society can achieve the careful balance of safety, privacy, and security remains the next challenge.
