Thread

1. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1789535685 · focus · HN ↗

   This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

   There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

   Edit: And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case, the insurance/ID verification use cases are perfectly fine with anything that raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort. Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

   1. rickdeckard · 1789543712 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't understand the vector of this:

      An insurance would either assign #1 an insurance agent or mechanic to initially assess the damage (trusted) or #2 ask the customer to send pictures (untrusted).

      Tendency is #2 for cost-saving of the insurance, and 3rd party apps are used to execute this.

      Now the idea is that the insurance company discontinues the App and the (untrusted) customer must have an iPhone 18 Pro to make an insurance claim?

      Or is the insurance agent / mechanic an untrusted entity who will now be required to have an iPhone 18 Pro?

      What is the fraud vector here, and how can the insurance service provider continue cost-saving on damage-assessment by offloading to the customer, if the customer is required to own a specific device?

      1. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1789592424 · focus · HN ↗

         Nowadays they do #3, demand that the customer takes pictures with a special app that claims to make the process nearly as trusted as #1 while being nearly as cheap as #2.

         The idea is indeed that instead or in addition to requiring an app, the insurance company would require the app to run on a phone that supports Reference Image to make sure the image wasn't tampered with. Not right now, when the phones are new, but in a while when 50% of Americans have a sufficiently new iPhone. The rest of the people gets told to either borrow one if they want to make a claim, or go through some other alternative process designed to be so annoying that most people give up.

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