Someone should have to ask
There is a photograph of you on the internet. Almost certainly several. A profile picture, a tagged photo from a wedding, a school team, a company page.
That is all a modern tool needs to make a video of you doing something you never did.
Not a convincing-ish video. A convincing one. And not by a specialist. By anyone, in about a minute.
What happens next is the part worth understanding
Say it happens. Someone makes something of you and puts it somewhere.
Here is what follows, and it is the same process that almost every law and every platform is currently building toward.
You find it. Or someone tells you about it, which is worse.
You report it. You prove you are the person in it, which usually means sending identification to a stranger.
You wait. Two weeks is a common target. One proposed industry standard names exactly fourteen days.
Then it comes down.
By then it has been seen. Screenshotted. Reposted somewhere else, where the process starts over.
That is the good outcome. That is what it looks like when the system works.
Almost nobody asks the other question
All of that effort goes into removing something after it exists.
Very little goes into why it got to exist. A tool made it. Somebody typed a description and uploaded your photograph, and the tool did what it was told, and at no point did anything stop and check whether you had agreed.
It could have. The check takes less than a second.
That is the whole idea here. Not a faster takedown. A moment before.
What a passport is
You will enroll your face once. It should take about a minute. Enrolment is not open yet.
After that, a platform that has integrated Faceward checks before it generates anything. It asks two things: is there a permission naming this person, and is the face in the reference picture actually that person. Both have to be true, or it refuses.
We store no photographs. What we hold is a mathematical summary of a face, kept encrypted. That summary is not a photograph and it is not enough to identify you anywhere else, but it is not nothing either: with the right tools a rough face can be recovered from one, which is why it is protected by encryption and key custody rather than by the maths.
It protects people who never signed up
This is the part people find surprising.
If a platform will not generate a realistic image of a person without a permission naming them, then nobody can be generated that way. Not because they are on a list. Because nobody can produce a permission in their name.
This holds for platforms that have integrated it. Anyone running their own software on their own machine is outside it, and no permission system reaches them.
A system that works by searching for your face can only protect the people it has faces for. This one works the other way round.
Now the honest part
No AI platform has integrated Faceward yet.
So today, this does not protect you. Reserving a passport is not a shield. It is a statement.
We would rather say that plainly than have you find it out later.
So why sign up
Two reasons.
It is free, permanently, and it takes a minute. If platforms do adopt this, you are already in rather than joining a queue after something has happened to you.
And the number matters. When we sit down with a platform, the question is always the same one: does anybody actually want this. The count on our front page is the answer to that question. Right now it is small. That is the honest situation, and it is the part you can change.
Reserve a passport. Then send this to one person who would also rather be asked.
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