humanID Progress Update 05/25/20

What’s humanID: humanID is a nonprofit building a replacement to social media logins like “Login with Facebook”. Unlike existing logins, humanID allows users to sign onto third-party websites or apps with full anonymity.

For more info please visit: https://www.human-id.org/

Greetings human,

These past two weeks were special to the humanID team. Our growing community just welcomed a new batch of team members.

1. Sydney Mason is a computer science student at Harvard College. She will be focusing on Product this summer. Since joining, Sydney has already contributed significantly to humanID’s integration with Green Zone, our first paying client tracking Covid in India.
2. Sara Solomon brings a wealth of experience fundraising and client outreach. Her passion working and volunteering in the public sector will help humanID accelerate our fundraising efforts.
3. Mariam Kish is a Human Development and Regenerative Biology student at Harvard College. She is joining Sara to accelerate our fundraising progress.
4. Sanjana Singh is a computer science student at Harvard College. Sanjana has researched bot networks and fake news while at Harvard. She is part of our Sales & Marketing team.
5. Adam Park is a philosophy student at Harvard College. Adam has research in how fake news presents a challenge to democratic discourse and discussion of ideas by humans. Adam is part of our Sales & Marketing team.
6. Vinamra Jain is a 2nd year student at Harvard Business School. Prior to HBS, Vinamra worked at Bain, Star TV and Disney. Vinamra will be leading our Sales effort.
7. Eric Reyes-Munoz is studying Applied Mathematics and is focusing on connecting with and understanding potential integration partners.

Meanwhile, we’re preparing to grow the team further this week. It’s inspiring to see so many passionate people come together to work towards a common vision!

Client Integrations:

Our first app — a friend’s project we’re using to test — has been launched.

On iOS, the app can be found here, an Android, we’re currently waiting for approval from the Playstore team. Go try humanID :)

In other exciting news, we started the process to integrate with our first client — a particularly urgent and impactful use case:

GreenZone is a partnership that will enable a safer recovery from the covid pandemic. The GreenZone app offers a way for owners of local businesses such as restaurants to track their clients and visitors anonymously. Using humanID, the health authorities will be able to reach out to potentially exposed individuals, all while keeping users in control of their data and fully protecting users’ privacy.

Instead of sharing phone numbers, the app tracks users’ app-specific humanIDs within the GreenZone application. In case of exposure, users are urged via push and in-app notifications to reach out to the local authorities.

Legal requirements to document visitors to stores and restaurants have started to undermine privacy in different countries across the world. These systems will only work efficiently, if users can trust their data is handled privately, and GreenZone can offer just that thanks to humanID.

Here is how the integration will look like, as created by our Product Manager Sydney (Designs are preliminary and work-in-progress:

Green Zone, a covid tracking app, powered by humanID

While we have additional clients who are willing to work with us, we want to closely monitor the first launches before rolling out further. In the meantime, Vinamra, Eric and Bikram together with Bastian and Shuyao are preparing to reach out to a lot more potential partners — prioritizing Covid-related apps due to the urgency.

Covid tracking truly shows the importance of humanID. For many people, including 50% of Americans, wouldn’t feel comfortable installing a tracking app. Only if users feel save and protected, this number will increase, which will protect us all.

Asks:

1. We are looking for platforms that could benefit from a privacy-native identity solution that demands minimum integration. Shoot us a message and let’s talk: shuyao@human-id.org
2. If you know any funding source that support nonprofit cybersecurity startup that aims to fight against fake news. let’s talk as well: shuyao@human-id.org

We love you.

Cheers

humanID team