Why does my bank require my vote to register?

And as we see and hear more and more deep fakes, using our voice to access our accounts may not seem like such a good idea.

But Lee downplayed those concerns, saying most of us don’t have a strong enough presence on the Internet to attract the attention of hackers or make it easy for them to develop truly convincing clones.

And what about celebrities? Podcasters? Or really anyone who posts videos on social media? Lee argued that most hackers like to hack on a large scale, and most of us don’t have that much money in our bank accounts.

“It’s a little harder for someone to acquire your voice, and identity thieves don’t like to do difficult things. They prefer to do things that are easy,” Lee said. “So the risk to the individual is relatively low.”

Reasons to think again

Your financial data is probably your most sensitive data, even if you don’t have a lot of money in your accounts.

In addition, publicly available generative AI tools are notoriously insecure, with most companies that make the software making little to no effort to ensure that the people being copied have consented to the process.

“It seems like it’s quickly becoming a normalized insanity where just questioning it makes you feel old,” said Justin Kloczko, a technology and privacy attorney at Consumer Watchdog. “It’s not really safe, and you really shouldn’t feel crazy.”

What do the banks say?

KQED reached out to several financial institutions for this article, but only Wells Fargo responded:

“Wells Fargo uses a multi-layered approach to authenticationOne such layer is a service called “Voice Verification,” which allows customers to access certain accounts using a unique voiceprint. This service must be coupled with other identity verification methods to enable access to customer accounts. A customer’s language ID alone does not grant access to user accounts.”