Are You Ready to Verify Yourself as a Human?

By Carl Williams, Capability Director at Novon

Adopt cloud-based data management and cloud-based data storage.

Add a data fabric architecture for seamless integration. Organisations are looking for flexible data management solutions as data continues to sprawl across disparate destinations—on-premises data centres, multiple clouds, and edge devices.

You are Awesome. Don't forget it.

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You’ve probably heard whispers or maybe even read about Sam Altman’s eye-scanning “orbs”. Orbs, as in shiny spheres that scan your eyeballs in exchange for a digital ID. On the surface, it sounds like something out of a sci-fi flick. But the concept behind it? On the surface it makes sense and, depending on your perspective, something that’s needed.

The idea is simple: in a world increasingly flooded with bots, deepfakes, and AI-generated content, how do we prove who—or what—we are? Altman’s answer is a unique ID tied to your biometric data: your iris. A kind of “proof of personhood”. The project promises to distinguish real humans from artificial intelligence which is getting better & better every day.

But what does this mean for Australians? Beyond the headlines and the unsettling prospect of having our eyeballs scanned at Westfield? Do Australian’s now want to hand over their Biometric Data to another large American Company as well & unlike a password you can’t change your eyeball!

Orb-1

The Case for Human Verification

The problem is real. As AI becomes more powerful, the internet is fast becoming a blur of automated content, deepfake videos, and AI-generated interactions. Fake news, fake users, fake everything. It’s getting harder to know what’s real—and who’s real. Social media bot’s inflaming culture wars is a nightmare, swinging everyday people to the fringes of politics and more radical views.

In that environment, a secure, decentralised way of proving your “humanness” could be useful. Especially in digital spaces where identity matters—voting, financial transactions, even social media. The eye-scanning orbs are essentially trying to build the infrastructure for that.

The Data Behind the Iris

Anything involving biometrics opens up a whole new set of questions. Your iris isn’t just a unique pattern—it’s you. So what happens to that data? Who stores it? Who controls it? And what rights do you have to it?

According to the project team, your biometric data is hashed and never stored in a way that links back to you. But even so, it’s another example of how critical it is to get data governance right in this AI-driven era.

Getting Ready for AI

Whether or not eye-scanning orbs become the norm, the reality is we’re moving toward a world where identity and data are inextricably linked. AI thrives on data. But AI also amplifies the risk of data misuse, bias, or exposure—especially when that data relates to who we are as people.

That’s why forward-thinking organisations are now focused on getting their data “AI-ready”—and that includes ensuring privacy protocols, governance frameworks, and ethical considerations are in place. Not just to tick compliance boxes, but to build trust in an increasingly algorithmic world.

Carl

What’s driving a modern Data Architecture?

In today's digital economy, data is a critical asset that drives business innovation, efficiency, and a competitive advantage. A modern data architecture is at the heart of leveraging this business asset. It is designed to address the complexities and scale of managing data in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. So, what are the key tenants of a modern data architecture that allow for this agility, innovation, and security of your organisations data.

Adopt cloud-based data management and cloud-based data storage.
Add a data fabric architecture for seamless integration. Organisations are looking for flexible data management solutions as data continues to sprawl across disparate destinations—on-premises data centres, multiple clouds, and edge devices.
Add a data mesh architecture to simplify and focus your response to the changing data landscape. It will enable your organisation to respond quickly and cost effectively to the data changes that abound in 2024
Adopt automation using generative AI and ML in data management.
Adopt low-code / no-code for data integration. Find the vendors or data specialists that have completed work similar to your challenge. Successful experienced operators are key.
Provide data governance, security, and privacy in an automated fashion. There is no time in 2024 to manually rediscover and develop data changes that other organisations have already found and adopted. These changes must be automated through generative AI and ML capabilities.

Anxious Australian Man Novon Branding BW

Data management guiding principles still apply in today’s data landscape, however, today change is very rapid and there is no room for a bottom-up approach to managing your data, rather you should build pervasive AI / generative AI / ML models that do the heavy lifting for you.

In 2023 and still today we talk about data gravity as a key challenging principle of today’s modern enterprise data platform, but increasingly anti-data gravity is seen as the key issue in 2024 and beyond.

Data gravity is well documented, essentially this is where the accumulation of data (operations and analytical) attracts more data and services into its business data mix, thereby increasing data complexity and potentially causing serious challenges for an organisation to maximise the value of their data, especially if you have adopted a cloud first approach for your infrastructure. To further complicate this scenario, consider the challenges if you are a global organisation as you manage across different time zones, regulatory and business structures.

Anti-gravity advocates that the data and expertise should stay local and the two modern data architectures when used correctly can help moderate these challenges are data fabric and data mesh architectures.

So… Would You Scan Your Eyeball?

It’s still early days for the orbs. Maybe they’ll become a standard part of life in 10 years. Maybe they’ll fizzle out like many bold tech ideas. But the questions they raise are worth exploring: What does it mean to be human in a digital world? How do we prove it? And who gets to decide?
As technology blurs the lines between real and artificial, the way we manage, protect, and understand data—especially data that reflects us—has never been more important.

At Novon, we’re helping organisations prepare for that future. Not just with the tools, but with the frameworks, ethics, and strategy to get data ready for what’s next.
Because when the orbs come knocking, you’ll want your data in order.