The digital identity verification landscape is diverse, with platforms ranging from enterprise compliance solutions to consumer-friendly investigative tools. Two platforms that represent different ends of this spectrum are Signicat, a Norwegian digital identity and electronic signature platform that serves as a trust service provider for businesses across Europe, and facesearching, a face search engine that lets users find someone by photo across the public web. Signicat is deeply integrated into the European digital identity ecosystem, offering electronic identification (eID) schemes, qualified electronic signatures, and identity verification services that comply with EU regulations including eIDAS and GDPR. facesearching, by contrast, operates globally and focuses on public web reverse face search — enabling users to verify identity by analyzing a person's digital footprint. This comparison explores the differences between these two platforms to help you determine which is right for your needs.
What Is Signicat?
Signicat, founded in 2007 in Norway, is a digital identity platform that provides identity verification, electronic signing, and authentication services to businesses across Europe. The company's platform integrates with more than 30 electronic identity schemes across Europe, including national eID systems like BankID (Norway, Sweden), NemID (Denmark), itsme (Belgium), and many others. Signicat's core services include identity proofing (verifying user identities through document checks, biometric matching, and national eID integration), authentication (enabling secure login using national eIDs), and electronic signatures (providing qualified electronic signatures that are legally binding under eIDAS regulations). Signicat is heavily focused on the European market and is designed to help businesses comply with European regulations including eIDAS, GDPR, and AML directives. The platform is used by banks, insurance companies, government agencies, and other regulated businesses in Europe.
What Is facesearching?
facesearching is a face search engine that takes a fundamentally different approach to identity verification. Instead of relying on government-issued eIDs or document verification, it verifies identity by scanning the public web for a person's face. When a user uploads a photo, facesearching searches more than 100 platforms — including social media, news sites, blogs, forums, and video content — to find where that face appears online. The results reveal the subject's digital footprint, which can be used to verify identity, detect fraud, and conduct background research. The platform is designed for speed and privacy: results are returned in under a minute, and the uploaded photo is deleted immediately after processing with no permanent biometric database maintained. facesearching serves a global user base — individuals, investigators, journalists, law enforcement, and businesses — and is not tied to any specific regulatory framework or geographic region.
Key Differences: facesearching vs Signicat
- Geographic focus: Signicat is deeply focused on the European market and integrates with European national eID schemes. facesearching operates globally and is not tied to any specific geographic region.
- Verification method: Signicat verifies identity through national eIDs, document verification, and biometric matching. facesearching verifies identity by matching a face against its public digital footprint — social media, news, and web content.
- Regulatory framework: Signicat is designed for compliance with EU regulations including eIDAS, GDPR, and AML directives. facesearching operates on public web data and is not tied to any specific regulatory framework, though its privacy-first architecture supports GDPR compliance.
- Services offered: Signicat offers identity verification, authentication, and qualified electronic signatures. facesearching offers reverse face search — finding where a face appears on the public web.
- User base: Signicat serves European businesses in banking, insurance, government, and regulated industries. facesearching serves a global audience of individuals, investigators, journalists, businesses, and law enforcement.
- Privacy model: Signicat processes and stores data in compliance with GDPR and eIDAS requirements. facesearching deletes uploaded photos immediately after processing and does not maintain a permanent biometric database.
When to Choose Signicat
Signicat is the clear choice if you are a business operating in Europe that needs to verify customer identities, authenticate users, and execute legally binding electronic signatures in compliance with EU regulations. If your customers are European citizens who have national eIDs, Signicat's integration with these schemes provides a seamless, regulation-compliant verification experience. Signicat is also the right choice if you need qualified electronic signatures that are legally equivalent to handwritten signatures under eIDAS — a capability that is essential for many business contracts, financial agreements, and government transactions in Europe. Additionally, if you are a regulated business that needs to demonstrate GDPR and AML compliance to auditors and regulators, Signicat's purpose-built compliance framework is a significant advantage. However, Signicat is not designed for the kind of investigative research and public web search that facesearching provides, and its services are limited to the European market.
When to Choose facesearching
facesearching is the better choice if you need to find someone by photo and verify their identity through their public digital footprint, regardless of geographic location. This is valuable when you are dealing with individuals who may not have European eIDs, when you need to verify identity outside of regulated business contexts, or when you need to investigate a person's online presence comprehensively. If you are an individual concerned about catfishing, a journalist investigating a source, a landlord screening a tenant, or a business conducting enhanced due diligence on a high-risk customer, facesearching provides capabilities that Signicat does not offer. facesearching is also the better choice if you need a verification tool that is accessible to individuals and small businesses, with pricing that is affordable for non-enterprise use cases. The platform's global reach — covering the entire public web rather than a specific set of national eID schemes — makes it suitable for users anywhere in the world.
Privacy and Data Protection
Both platforms take privacy seriously, but their approaches differ. Signicat's privacy model is built around GDPR compliance, with data processing agreements, data retention policies, and the full apparatus of European data protection regulation. This is appropriate for its role as a trust service provider handling sensitive identity data for regulated businesses. facesearching takes a different approach: it minimizes the data it handles by deleting uploaded photos immediately after processing and not maintaining a permanent biometric database. This approach is inherently privacy-friendly and aligns with data minimization principles that are central to GDPR and other privacy regulations. For users who are concerned about the long-term storage and potential misuse of their biometric data, facesearching's approach provides a level of assurance that even GDPR-compliant platforms may not, because the data simply does not exist after the search is complete.
Signicat is the gatekeeper of European digital identity, connecting businesses to national eID systems. facesearching is the investigator, scanning the global web to find the digital footprint behind any face. Different tools, different missions, both essential in the modern identity landscape.