A new company has made it possible for users to verify if someone’s online profile is genuine, reports TechCrunch. The new startup, CheckedProfile, launches today and allows users to check profiles on site such as Twitter, Facebook, and more importantly, dating sites.
According to the CheckedProfile Web site, the first step is to upload a picture that you would like the company to verify as being really you. Next, the company will provide you with a custom identifier. Customers are then asked to write the identifier on a sheet of paper and take a photograph of themselves holding the page with the identifier. Once the new photo has been uploaded, CheckedProfile will verify that the person in both images in the same. If proven to be genuine, the company will provide the user with a new verified photograph, which can be used on all of the popular social networking Web sites.
Although the service is free for women and children, it costs $1.99 for men. And it doesn’t come without its skeptics. Mike Butcher of TechCrunch writes “CheckedProfile claims it has patented this whole process – although to be honest it sounds pretty replicable. And what I don’t get is why they can’t apply a facial recognition technology to this process or perhaps crowd-source it – because having humans checking profile does not scale.”
However, founder of the new startup Ben Way told Butcher the company has “an incredibly efficient back end” that takes on average 20 seconds to verify a photo, and that other facial recognition technologies are not up to the job yet.”