A new skin-care start-up wants to analyze your skin and pay you in Bitcoin for the privilege.Author:Leah PrinzivalliPublish date:Sep 19, 2018As a beauty writer, I had hoped never to have to write the words "blockchain" and "skin care" in the same sentence. But as more and more stories come out about cryptocurrency millionaires and their yachts, the crypto economy is getting harder to ignore.
Founder and CEO Marc Bookman first conceived of Opu in 2014, when he was working in search analysis and mobile advertising. But it's no surprise that the company pushed this year, when facial recognition and blockchain are becoming less confusing tech jargon and more regular words in plenty of people's vocabularies. Facial recognition technology may already be quite familiar to mobile-optimized beauty lovers .
As Bookman will tell you, the technology is still a work in progress, and it's fair to assume that eventually the algorithm will sharpen and become a bit more accurate. But Opu is also working on additional tech offerings, like the ability to track a product's efficacy through as you update facial scans over time. Soon, you'll also be able to set skin goals like "I want reduced acne in 30 days.
An Opu representative confirms that "your face is private and secure within the ecosystem [of Opu] itself." I was worried that my own data privacy concerns were too crotchety, and then I spoke to Dr. Ann Cavoukian, expert-in-residence at Ryerson University's Privacy by Design Centre. The first words she said to me were "this makes me really nervous."
Did Michelle Phan write this