05 | Alejandro Reskala - How to Prove You Are Really You

What happens to our decisions when we can no longer trust that our data, or the people behind it, are real?

Bob sits down with Alejandro Reskala, a technology executive who has spent his career on one deceptively simple question: how do you know the data in front of you belongs to the person you think it does?

It was meant to be about credit bureaus. It became something bigger. Alejandro traces a line from video games and medical imaging to credit scoring in 15 to 20 countries, then lands on the problem facing every AI system. If a machine cannot verify where data came from, how can it make a decision worth standing behind?

This one gets into identity, fraud, watermarking, and whether trust is what decides how far AI can go. Listen now.

• 00:04:08 The check readers Alejandro coded in assembler, before databases were normal
• 00:05:35 From owning every game console to building augmented reality that reached NASA
• 00:07:10 The Black Swan, 9/11, and the collapse that redirected a career
• 00:08:08 The job offer built on trust, not experience
• 00:09:21 The biggest myth about credit bureaus, and why it will not die
• 00:13:39 Is scoring your credit the same as reading a medical scan? Bob presses the analogy
• 00:14:16 Before you can pull Bob’s file, you have to prove the file is Bob’s
• 00:21:33 Inside the work of building credit bureaus in 15 to 20 countries
• 00:23:57 The case that a credit bureau is closer to a human right than a hassle
• 00:25:43 Move countries and your credit history vanishes. Why that still is not solved
• 00:31:15 Two Bob Lytles, one misspelled name, and the cost of guessing wrong
• 00:35:43 The fraud problem growing fastest, and who is impersonating whom
• 00:40:20 Why matching the data still does not prove you are you
• 00:43:34 Why data provenance just became a must, not a nice-to-have
• 00:45:16 Should we stop AI? Alejandro calls it a rhetorical question
• 00:49:15 How anyone can lie with data, and the toothpaste that proves it

• The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Google SynthID
• TransUnion
• Real Vision

Alejandro Reskala is a technology executive who builds the systems that decide whether data can be trusted. He most recently served as Vice President, International and Regional Chief Information Officer for Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean at TransUnion, and a former Chief Information Officer of the credit bureau in Mexico. His career runs from digital image processing and early augmented reality work in Seattle to building credit bureaus in 15 to 20 countries. Today, his focus is identity, entity resolution, and the growing problem of proving where data actually comes from.

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Curious Data is an original production hosted by Bob Lytle. Brought to you by Centri Analytics. Production and editing by Podcast Your Brand.