CheckedProfile: Verify your Picture / Photo (that it is definitely true and you)

How many horror online dating stories have you heard or read so far? Does it always end up that the picture you saw in your date’s profile was either not them or was taken a long time ago that they don’t look anything like it? Here comes a really cool and simple concept that solves this problem. CheckedProfile is a new website that is catered in verifying pictures of people online, here’s how it works:

… CheckedProfile checks profiles manually by hiring their own experts to verify the pictures, here’s the step by step procedure:

– Here’s how the code is included to the picture –

1. User uploads their picture
2. A code is given after uploading and you need to take a picture of yourself with the code
3. Upload the picture with the code
4. Experts verify the picture is really you
5. Once approved, you can then use it to show that it is really you.

What’s really cool about it is how it answers a complex problem with such a simple concept. I, however, were quite surprised with the pricing making it free for the first account for women and children while charging $1.99 for men (where’s the equality). Their reason was “The fact is that women and children have far less prevalence of identity fraud compared to men, so we have to charge a little more for men”. But any verifications after the First account is charged at $0.99 per picture. I also wonder what happens if the person’s good with photoshop and was able to edit their pictures really well, could they spot the difference? Are they able to tell which one’s are edited vs raw pictures? How far does the verification go? Right now the verification is still simple but it states in their website that it will be better soon (as they’re still in Beta version).

I’m personally impressed with their concept, it was bound to happen at some point with millions, if not billions, of pictures are uploaded to the web. It’s going to be interesting how online dating services are going to use their services, and if they do, this website is going to be worth a lot of money. I’m actually intrigued to what other verification methods they’ll do in the future, but the picture security thing I believe is going to be quite big.