You’ll soon be able to pay for things using facial recognition software
Forget your PIN. Throw away that pen, because signing is a thing of the past. The new way to pay for things by credit card is the selfie. Yes, you read that correctly – you’ll soon be able to pay for your purchases using facial recognition software, MasterCard announced last week.
The technology, created by MasterCard in a partnership with tech giants Google, Apple, and Samsung, will digitise one’s face into a series of ones and zeros, convert that series into a hash, and then compare that with one stored on the MasterCard servers. If all of that sounds a little complex, don’t worry – it’s confused us as well. All we know is that people far cleverer than us have come up with a fancy way to use technology.
The technology will be used through an app on smartphones, which is activated with a fingerprint, or by staring at one’s phone and blinking once – a trick used to prevent people using a photo to hoodwink the system.
MasterCard have revealed that they won’t have access to the photos, as it will be converted to the hash (see: the confusing process one paragraph above) to be stored in their database – they’ll never be able to recreate your face using the stored information.
A test with 500 cardholders is expected to begin soon, with plans to launch the technology worldwide next year.
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