Identity Resolution Daily

Our blog has only been around since June, but when it comes to identity resolution, we’ve covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

Yesterday, Brian Calvert, one of our software architects, spotted a must-read post by Courtney C. Radsch called The Politics of Naming: Post-9/11 Security and the Transliteration of Arabic Names. Ms. Radsch’s post on the difficulty of transliterating Arabic became a jumping off point for Brian to write about the complexities of identity resolution in all names, not just Arabic names.

Brian’s post (below) is essentially about identity resolution’s place in national security and his words prompted a look back over the archives for previous posts to get a comprehensive look at all the other industries we’ve covered. Below are some of the best posts from the previous two and half months.

Security

Playing the Name Game with Terrorist Watch Lists and Shoplifter Databases

“The language complexities pointed out in Ms. Radsch’s post illustrate the difficulties in resolving identities — and this holds true for both national security officials and retail loss prevention professionals. Whether you are at the ticket counter talking to an airline passenger, or at the returns desk with a customer, you need a complex solution to resolve the complexities of knowing who is who.”

Privacy

A Message from Mike Shultz about Identity Resolution

“Our software was designed to protect privacy, and the government is using it in the way that it was designed. As I said earlier, I’m the CEO of a software company, but I was a citizen before I was a CEO and I’ll be a citizen after I’m a CEO. And the citizen that I am sleeps fine at night knowing what I know about how the government is balancing identity resolution and privacy.”

Retail Industry

With Seconds to Spare, Retail Profits Walk out the Door Wearing Ill-gained Nike Tennis Shoes

“How the clerk reacts in the next few seconds is the difference between profit in the bank and loss walking (in Nike tennis shoes) out the front door. If the clerk takes the wrong action, your store can lose a valuable customer for life over a false positive.”

Identity Resolution and the Case of the Purloined Panties

“Many times the perpetrators give enough real information - partial addresses, similar names, phone numbers - that identity resolution can match these attributes against the shoplifter and other negative databases. If the retailers (and the sister stores) have information about these folks in their shoplifting database(s) that identity resolution can tap into, then you can call the police and end an organized retail crime (ORC) ring’s reign.”

Knowledge Center: Jeff Stein on Tech Tools to Trap ORCs

“With an identity resolution solution bolted on to your existing architecture, you can gather data from multiple data sources and apply sophisticated similarity search techniques to resolve multiple identities so you can figure out who the guy in handcuffs really is. And just as importantly, identity resolution susses out hidden relationships between individuals so you can also figure out who this guy works with.”

Employee Screening: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Lobsters

“With an identity resolution system in place, the jewelry store would have discovered that this employee had been sued by another employer for stealing $55,000 from a high school cheerleading program. It’s pretty much impossible to tell if a potential employee is a good or bad person by simply looking at their resume. However, identity resolution software aggregates information from existing data stores, turning up lawsuits, convictions, bad debt, driving histories and the like to form a clear, comprehensive, composite depiction of your employees.”

Identity Resolution for When Shrinkage is Up and Employee Morale is Down

“So it’s obviously critical to the health of your organization that you either do not hire or do not retain employees who pose a risk. For many organizations, this means doing costly third-party background screening. However, if you collect risk-oriented data on individuals, such as bad check writers, slip and fall incidents, and known shoplifters, you already have useful information that may prevent you from making a costly hiring decision. You just need a tool to access it.”

The Many Meanings of Data in the Retail Industry

“Like a transactional analysis system, a retail identity resolution system requires a very specific architecture. If the metaphor of the haystacks is applied to identity resolution, many of the haystacks are actually the same person trying to fraudulently pass themselves off as another person. The hard part is then resolving those multiple instances into one, accurate identity.”

Insurance Industry

The Not-so Funny Side of Insurance Fraud

“Most insurers have the data they need to catch these crooks. It’s just that the individual nuggets of information are too often contained in disparate silos - with no effective way to provide a “big picture” view for analysis. With an identity resolution solution that has non-obvious relationship matching capabilities, the insurance company would have been able to uncover a pattern of connections that indicated that something fishy was going on and they could then stop paying the fraudulent claims.”

Banking Industry

Knowledge Center: Barry Graubart on Complexity of Identity Resolution and Anti-Money Laundering

“To catch a sophisticated criminal, you need to implement sophisticated similarity search techniques to resolve multiple identities into one unified view. The importance of having an effective identity resolution solution in place that can resolve all these complexities is vitally important because the consequences of failing to detect a money launderer are much, much higher than when a shoplifter lifts a pair of pants.”

Marketing Industry

Why Identity Resolution is Necessary in Behavioral Marketing

“All of that seems great for increasing revenue, but it seems like identity resolution should be an integral part of this process as well. Without intelligent systems in place to create what Infoglide Software Chief Software Architect John Ripley recently called a “living context,” what you’ve got is a huge data store with tons of identity data but without any built-in accuracy or privacy protection, especially since the data’s purpose suggests a great deal of sharing.”

Social Networks

Why don’t MySpace and Facebook have Better Identity Screening?

“Whatever identity resolution measures MySpace has in place clearly allow a significant number of threats into the system. It seems that better software needs to be deployed, maybe that could cross-reference identities with law enforcement databases. If anonymity is inherent in the public use of so many social networks, the networks need to be able to target specific threats by using real data on the back end.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Identity Resolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.