Great question and I was hoping someone would take the time to read through their privacy policy. KYC was a difficult topic for us given our core focus on privacy. We vetted 8 major KYC providers before landing on Sumsub.
You’re not reading too far into their policy and using AI to detect fraud, extracting facial features to match your selfie against your ID, and the liveness check where you blink or smile appear in every single providers’ privacy policy in one form or another because that’s how modern identity verification is evolving. There’s no other way to confirm that someone is who they say they are without those steps, while at the same time constantly evolving to defend against new techniques used by bad actors to game the system (essentially good AI vs bad AI).
We landed on Sumsub because they had the clear(est) data retention and deletion policy and are one of the most widely used, so if you’ve performed KYC via them anywhere else before, your existing check can be re-used.
You’re right in that KYC is inherently de-anonymizing and at the same time we live in a payments world dominated by two monolithic networks; Visa and Mastercard and legislated by large governments that set the rules of participation.
Our goal is to give people the chance to participate in the simplest way and with the best possible privacy posture, given the constraints.