Digital Identity Isn’t Only For People

Why Not An Apple ID For Your Dog?

We spend a lot of time talking about digital identity for people and speculating about whether Apple ID or federated Bank ID or centralised Government ID is the best implementation. But in the new online world, there are a great many things other than people that will need to have digital identities in order to participate in a functioning post-industrial economy. Things, for example. Artificial Intelligences. Bots will need identities. In fact I'm writing a book about this at the moment. It's called "Will Robots Need Passports?" and it will be out next year sometime.

(And the answer, as I am sure you already know, is "yes". Spoiler alert: robots will need passports because they will need to have authorisation to access resources.)

What other things will need identities? Well, I read with great interest a report in the Times of India about a new smartphone app that farmers can use to check information about cattle. This was developed in response to an appeal from Prime Minister Modi for a means to reduce cattle theft. As you probably know, India already has a national identity number for people and it has worked pretty well, providing a low-cost mechanism to establish the unique identities of citizens and thereby contribute to the goal of financial inclusion which (as everyone knows) is an identity problem. Therefore, it would seem logical to give animals a number too.

But how do you tell Napoleon from Snowball? Well, specific information "unique to each animal" like the footprint, height, weight, colour and tail hair is recorded in the software and a unique ID is generated. As one of the designers of the Indian app notes, the animal ID "is very useful when insuring cattle", which is a good point. I am slightly surprised that, all other things being equal, they didn't put the IDs on a quantum-resistant blockchain in the cloud, but that's probably version 3.

We don't spend anything like enough time thinking about the digital identity of animals. The biometric identification of animals and the association of a digital identity with individual beasts clearly has significant economic value which, in turn, means fintech opportunities.

Old MacDonald Had A Farm Supply Chain, G-I-G-I-O

I don't know how unique animal footprints are, so I cannot comment on adjusting the false accept and false reject rates for optimal barnyard efficiency, but I do know that face recognition might be a quicker and more efficient way to tell one cow from another not only for tracking but also for detecting diseases or finding lost animals. The identification can then also been used to feed into databases to offer consumers more transparent information about the origin of their food and ensure the animals have been well-treated. I’m not sure if I really want to scan the barcode on my rib of beef and have the system pull up a picture of the cow grazing peacefully, but if some people do then why not give it a try? There are plenty of “blockchain” startups out there right now trying to track food from source to table and perhaps animal digital identity is what they need to automate for efficient data entry (after all, garbage in, garbage that’s now immutable out: GIGIO).

The point is that fintechs spend their time thinking about identity for people, but animals have identities and face recognition can be used to onboard them for digital identities too. And these digital identities have real value. That’s not to say that animal face recognition is easy. As the Wall Street Journal noted, face recognition for animals is actually pretty difficult because "It's not like you can tell a donkey to stand still". Nevertheless it can be done.

I know this because I was privileged to have Dr. Jion Guong Shen from JD Digits, a subsidiary of JD (China's largest e-commerce business) on my panel about AI ethics and governance at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) last year. I mention this panel because JD Digits, amongst other things, runs face recognition services for farmyard animals including cows and pigs. It turns out that pig face recognition, in particular, is a big business.

There are 700m pigs in China, and the productivity gains that farmers can obtain from ensuring that each pig is fed optimally, that sick pigs are kept away from the herd (and so on) are very significant. Pig farmers in Guangxi province trialling the technology found that it reduced costs and improved welfare outcomes for the pigs themselves. Apparently the face recognition system also goes some way to reigning in the wannabe Napoleons, as Dr. Shen explained that there are some “bully pigs” who try to obtain a disproportionate share of barnyard resources. The system can spot them chowing down when they shouldn’t be and flag for intervention.

Why The Long Face?

Interestingly, The Guardian newspaper reports that this facial recognition technology also cuts down on “breeding time”. How I can’t imagine, but UK researchers in this same field (pun intended), funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), are capturing 3D and 2D facial images of breeding sows in (I am not making this up) different emotional states. The images are then processed at the University of the West of England in Bristol, where machine learning is used to automatically identify different emotions conveyed by particular pig facial expressions. It seems that there’s an opportunity for some kind of farmyard Tinder here if I’m not mistaken.

All of which is by way of saying that fintechs and regtechs looking for opportunities in the digital identity space should cast their ideas net pretty wide. Digital identities are not only for people and the future desperately needs digital identities for pretty much everything to underpin recognition, relationships and reputation (the 3Rs of the online economy). Aadhar for animals is an interesting first step, but it really is only a first step.