Rob Yong recently tweeted he is going to get partypoker to implement facial recognition to combat cheaters/bots/ and account sharing-selling. Do you see this as a good idea or way too difficult to implement correctly and conveniently?

some responses from him on twitter to aid discussion

yeah, randomly harrass people to plug in webcams / face tech. difficulties while playing for a life changing, or a very good money. cause obviously noone should keep a webcam plugged in if some 3rd party (meh, literally party) can access it anytime they want.

odds of Rob Young thinks a bot = an actual robot sits in the chair and pushing buttons? what the **** is facial recognition has to do with someone using a bot to play poker? or even ghosting? he never heard of remote control?

last week there was news of a company massively scanning the net for facial data and building a huge database and selling it to governments and companies and now this. every time im about to put some money on party again rob just comes with this crazy stuff...

i don’t want a gambling company that already has my name, address, utility bills, credit card info to also have my damn facial recognition data.

I don’t think it’s the ‚standard‘ today. I believe people should stop putting their faces on the internet.

Rob Yong blocks anyone that (even slightly) disagrees with him, should Party really be taking advice on business decisions from his own personal echo chamber?

Don't they already have it when you send a copy of your ID for verification?

Sites already have all your data and picture, this would be good for poker in general I think if the software was up to scratch like it is on iPhones for example

So how many tables are running with peoples real names on partypoker right now, the idea he had one year ago?

i'm certainly not a tech expert but I always sort of envisioned the future of online gaming to sort of take on the VR experience. I've watched plenty of Black Mirror episodes and it seems only fitting that the future of gaming could possibly emulate such a virtual reality. Also, seems if such a reality became the norm that it could also provide better security measures(again, tech noob though). Just feel that competitive gaming in the future across all platforms will be much different than it is today.

Pretty courageous move for a company to ban everyone without a webcam on their computer from playing on their site.

Further, the idea that it would be challenging to have a human sit in front of a computer operating a bot is just dumb. The hardest-to-detect "bots" are already entirely operated by humans, so this is just another dumb idea from a guy who just spouts whatever idiocy falls into his head without having a deep understanding of the challenges of this sector.

I feel like this is a positive step, in that it's on the radar and they are looking for solutions. The only issue I have is that I don't believe the issue is bots being left to run with no human interaction. In most cases it's in game real time assistance being used by players that are mostly somewhat competent players, which won't be detected through random webcam verification.

Although, if PP bot/real time assistance detection and ban rate is high then this will be a great solution to the problem of them just setting up new accounts/buying accounts.

I think a better solution, rather than a blanket approach to all new customers, would be to (easily) set a criteria for "suspicious accounts" and if that criteria is met (i.e new account, high volume, long hours, comparing frequencies to optimal frequencies etc etc) they are required to verify at login and also random times via webcam. No reg will have an issue with this if it protects the integrity of the games.

Not everyone has webcams these days, most just use facetime or their phones for skype. I feel like a blanket approach like this may be an obstacle to the new punter and they will go straight to another site.

Show your arse, login as Deeb

they might have a 6+ years or so old static picture from my ID, but scanning my face pretty much every day and their software having access to my webcam is just different.

rob is a public figure and is used to having his face on the internet, but im not. his great idea to have real name high stakes tables, which dont seem to work at all, is just another example of him being not able to empathize with the normal internet poker player.

and it just doesnt make sense to prevent people from using real time assistence, i actually believe this way there will be even less bans, since some software is scanning your face but has absolutely no idea whats happening on your screen or on another screen next to it and security will just rely on these scans. it only keeps people from playing under fake accounts maybe. but i guess there are some other options for this too. sure lets have everybodys face scanned for everything - even **** like online poker. come on guys, its 2020 ok, but not 1984...

Interesting idea but surely anyone clever enough to program bots/run a bot ring will easily find way around this.

Yong is a bit of a menace to the poker industry at this point

The obvious solution is for the bot operator to sit in from of the computer.

All 152 of them?

Seriously, think that through.

If you can't afford a webcam, maybe you shouldn't be playing poker.

From a technology perspective, if you're running something on the server, you just can't trust anything coming from a client. It's always possible to tamper with. Thats why I laugh when people say things like "oh such and such software scans your system for other processes." Ok, using what? Syscalls that can be intercepted and mocked with fake results. As long as the end user has access the client system, you can't trust what the client reports.

In this case, as long as there's a financial incentive, people will figure out how to "spoof" the check. For example, you just hijack the network upload of the video stream and replace it with past instances of the video stream. I'm not saying this is necessarily easy, I'm saying that if you have a competent team on the client trying to spoof the process, and a competent team on the server trying to verify the client is who they say they are, in this case the client-side spoofers will always win because they have access to the client machine and can tamper with it. It's just a golden rule of computer security that you can't trust the client, and "use facial recognition of the client's webcam" fundamentally means you're trusting that the client's webcam is telling the truth.

Thus, it's a lot of overhead to accomplish very little.

I doubt the regulators would even allow this, unless the terms and conditions are very upfront, and Yong can somehow guarantee the images would never get shared with other companies (and would be deleted after a certain time frame).
I know that people randomly authorize apps on their phones to do clever imaging stuff (like the aging effect) with their selfies, but the companies making those 'fun' apps don't have our names, addresses, bank details or gambling histories.

This is completely correct, and I'm genuinely shocked about how many people think he's some messiah for the poker world when he really doesn't have a clue.

He made a name for himself by committing to overly ambitious guarantees in his own poker room, which looks good on the surface, but when you know about the tactics he used to reduce his financial liability (well documented in this forum), you can see how dodgy it all looks.

He struck gold when partypoker appointed an MD that has admitted he has no expertise in the game or industry (mistake #1), so they brought on Rob as as their expert consultant (mistake #2).

I've heard rumours about what his agreement includes (I won't share it), and I wouldn't be surprised to see him leave partypoker within the next year or two with enough money to last him multiple lifetimes.

Could the sites offer both "Standard" and "Facial Recognition tables"? Players would have the option to play were they felt more comfortable.

It's possible, but fracturing liquidity would not be good for the games