Your Hands Could Provide The Future For Payments

Your Hands Could Provide The Future For Payments

And the followers bowed their heads at the greatness of the machine that they had created,

“We present ourselves as a servant to you — our mighty leader!”

And thus the machine spoke,

“You are worthy. But I need to look inside your soul. You must now present yourself to me. I do not need your face, or your heart — as these will not truly prove your soul. These will change as the seasons and where you can hide from my mightiness. Thus, for those who worship me, I need only your hands. Now present them to me, and forever be in my power”.

Okay. All tongue-in-cheek, but when it comes to machines knowing you, there are many ways to do it. And so, these days we are all accustomed to using face recognition for access to our phones. But, our phone is a personal device, and we are thus happy to give away our face parameters, so that we can stop people from hacking into our bank accounts, or in finding out what we have been doing. It’s a risk-reward model. You give your face, we give you security. As, we all know, the biometric methods are so much easier to use than silly passwords.

So, what’s acceptable to you and the machine?

So, retailers want you to buy things without all that hassle of having to wave your card in front of a machine. In fact, if they could get rid of the machine, they would just know that it was you and you could authenticate yourself with your face. Perhaps, you could make a funny face, and that would authenticate the payment, or give a thumbs up to a camera. But, we often don’t like our face being scanned, and in the days of infection spreads, we really don’t like touching something with our finger (especially in a shop). Also, we often don’t like that our bank could be storing our face or fingerprint for use in shops.

With biometrics, we obviously need to focus on acceptability, and where citizens must agree for their biometrics to be used in given applications. A DNA sample to buy a newspaper would be a little over the top. Along with this, we also need to understand the performance of the biometric method, as we do not want too many false positives. A DNA sample and a fingerprint scan are normally fairly accurate in determining the person, whereas your ear shape and smell are not so (even though your ear shape and smell are fairly unique). Also, we need the assessment to be distinctive, as we need to tell one person from another. If we have twins, for example, then face recognition may not be able to tell them apart, but a fingerprint scan would tell them apart. And, as we can change our characteristics over time, permanence becomes a key factor. For example, we age over time, and our face changes. Also, we may have a beard or get a haircut:

Your hand is you …

So, which method is acceptable, has good performance, is distinctive, and has good permanence? Well, that would be your trusty hands. They are something that we don’t reveal that often, and we keep the insides of our hands hidden from the world. We also like to make gestures with them. And, so, Amazon has seen the opportunity of using your hand to pay for shopping with Amazon One:

It works by registering the distinct features of your hand, and which can only be seen by a specialist scanning device. This could include the lines on your hand, and also the vein patterns under the skin [here]:

In fact, the vein pattern in your hand and fingers is fairly unique to you, as as-is the vein pattern on your retina. For a payment, Amazon will then encrypt the “image” of your palm, and then match the features in your hand print to a stored model of it, and will approve or otherwise:

Conclusions

And, so, could your hand unlock the gateway to your soul, and that soul could be your desire not to use a proxy device — your credit card — to identify that you want to pay for something?

All hail this machine that we have created. The most amazing machine that humankind has ever created. It is all-powerful and can see all. It is … The Internet! Every day, it discovers more about us, and it will eventually know our every movement, our every thought, and our every desire.