At Seably, we’re always working on ways of making our certification process as secure and trustworthy as possible.
The way we do this is by an automatic and manual review process where we compare your driver’s license, passport, seamans book, or national identity card with a brand-new photo of yourself. The purpose is to check that the right person has done a course without the help of anyone else.
Because of this review process, we comply with requirements from DNV SeaSkill™ and several maritime flag-state administrations.
How does it work when Seably verifies identities?
When you’re asked to confirm your identity, you’ll need to add your legal name, a photo of a government ID (driver’s license, passport, seamans book, or national identity card). Additionally, you are asked to take a brand-new photo of yourself. This is different from your profile photo, which you may also be asked to provide. When you are asked to take a photo of yourself, it needs to match the photo on your ID, and your ID must be valid. If your photos don’t match, or your ID doesn't appear to be valid, you won't be able to earn a flag-state approved certificate.
You may have a few options for confirming your identity:
Take a photo of your ID using your phone.
Take a photo using the camera on your computer or mobile device.
Upload an existing photo of your ID.
After completing a course, we compare your Personal Verification with web camera pictures taking during training, to establish the identity of you as well as making sure that the course was completed without any inappropriate help. We only take pictures while answering questions within the quiz steps.
Is it Secure?
The identification info you provide to Seably is governed by our Privacy Policy and transmitted using secure encryption, the same process that websites use to transmit credit card numbers.
When we receive information from your government ID, we store the number in an encrypted form, so you should only have to confirm your identity once.
When the review is done and we have an approved Personal Verification, it would have been appropriate to delete the pictures. But, since we first issue a proof of training, which then converts into a flag-state certificate, the flag state also needs to compare the images. This is done during external audits, conducted every three years, the flag state reviews randomly selected images. Therefore we need to save your images for up to 36 months.
When will I be asked to confirm my identity?
You will be asked after completing a course that is approved by one or several maritime flag-state authorities.
How does the photo-matching work?
When you are asked to take a photo of yourself, we’ll match this photo with the picture in the government ID you already provided. This helps us make sure you’re really you.
Photo matching may provide some useful info, but no facial matching process is always completely accurate. The effectiveness of a comparison of facial features can vary greatly based on the skill and judgment of the reviewer, the quality and resolution of the photos, and whether there are significant changes in a person’s appearance between the two photos (for example, change in age, change in weight, different outfit).
As a result, this process may sometimes “match” photos that are not in fact of the same person or fail to match photos that are of the same person. Fraudulent individuals may circumvent even the most sophisticated efforts to match photos submitted for comparison. That's why we always manually double-check submitted photos that are flagged as uncertain, to make sure their digital identity is reliable.
Can I remove my Personal Verification?
Yes, you can. Just go to your www.seably.com/verify and from there you can click on the contextual menu (the three dots) and select Remove "Personal Verification".
We recommend not removing your Personal Verification. If you do, already issued certificates can be declared invalid if vetted during an external audit conducted by a flag-state authority.