Hearing is Believing – NOT!

Remember when we used to say seeing is believing. Or hearing.

Well not any more.

Want to hear Johnny Cash sing Barbie Girl? With amazing fidelity? It is available on YouTube.

Only problem is that the Barbie song came out after Cash was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease and had stopped performing.

Also, this recording was made in 2023, 20 years after Cash died.

Other than that, it makes perfect sense that a country artist whose main genre was prison, murder, death and other similar topics would record Barbie Girl.

The problem is that voice fakes are amazingly realistic.

And it does not take much audio to clone anyone’s voice. Less than a minute is often sufficient. One scam is to call a relative and say they were in jail or in the hospital and need the relative to wire money. Preferably a lot of money.

A more concerning issue that that financial institutions like banks and brokerages are using voice to verify a person’s identity. With these tools, many of which are free, that is an unreliable way to verify anything.

So many people have video on the Internet. Ray and I, for example, have hundreds of hours of our voice and video on the Internet. Most people under 40 have a significant amount of source material on social media such as TikTok. Maybe that is a good reason to ban TikTok.

The goal for banks and other financial institutions is to “reduce friction”, meaning making it easier to interact with them. If that costs them money, they just increase prices.

As consumers, the law is mostly in your favor.

As business owners, the law is mostly against you – the law assumes that you are smart enough to protect yourself – even from very high tech attacks.

So, whether you are a consumer or a business owner, you need to understand risk. Lets say you are a mortgage lender, even a small one. You probably move millions of dollars a month. Possibly a lot more.

Even as a general business owner, you need to pay suppliers and make payroll.

As a consumer, the hacker knows when you get paid.

No one wants their bank or brokerage or other account emptied out.

That is only one place where we are seeing Voice ID.

Other industries using voice authentication include retail, legal, healthcare and insurance, among others.

You need to understand your risk tolerance, and when the practices of a company exceed that risk tolerance, it is up to you to act.

Need help with this? Contact us.

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