Square pushes pay-by-facial recognition
For when NFC is just too secure
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Web 2.0 darling Square is promising to make everyone a regular by promoting pay-by-face: just smile and ask to have your purchase put onto your bill with no authentication required.
The system, which is opt in, knows which store you are in from the location of your phone, so presents the iPad-equipped shopkeeper with photographs of customers nearby – the customer identifies themselves by name and the shop taps on the corresponding photo, the customer then gets an electronic receipt.
There's explaining the concept for the hard of thinking, complete with jolly soundtrack:
The video takes place in a venue where they don't get a lot of customers, which helps, and one can't help thinking that the same process would be fraught with complications in a busy Starbucks, not to mention the obvious security implications.
Using photographs for identity has been thought of before; the credit card companies tried it a long time ago and discovered it was less reliable than signatures. So cursory was the facial-checking that one experimenter successfully used a card featuring a photograph of a gorilla's face, without shop staff blinking.
Users of Square's new service have to opt in, for each specific merchant, and get an electronic receipt, so anything beyond petty fraud should be noticed quite quickly. Users might have a hard time arguing that they didn't authorise a payment, but we'd assume a vendor couldn't do that very often without being blacklisted.
The service will appeal to those who want to appear popular, but don’t want to invest all that time patronising the same establishment, which is probably a significant number of people. But shopkeepers may prove more reluctant, as they'll have to have enough computing power, and connectivity, behind the till to make it work.
Square certainly needs more retailers signed up: its policy of giving away swipe readers is expensive and the company isn't going to justify its $1bn valuation with retailers only generating eight cents a week. Square showed this particular concept back in May, before it raised another $100m in VC cash, but it has now enabled the feature and produced a new video emphasising how the service enables shopkeepers to greet you by name as well as taking your money automatically. ®
COMMENTS
Just me?
Anyone else read "pay-by-facial" as something completely different?
"the service enables shopkeepers to greet you by name"
Why, isn't that the greatest innovation evar. Call me old fashioned, but I severely dislike being addressed by name by people I don't know. If I *know* the people don't know me either, that's just that much worse. I'm not in the military, I'm not wearing my name on my jacket, they don't *need* to know, so they *shouldn't* know.
Feh, I even dislike it whem websites that I've signed up to deign to address me by my first name. It might be de rigeur in silly valley, but to me it indicates a lack of respect. Not that this isn't the default in the silly valley-dominated intarwebz, of course. You're the product, and you damn well can suck up and like it. Anyway.
There's another slippery angle here, and that's that altough you may have opted in, I have not, and what are they doing with the images of me and others that haven't opted in? In the end it all comes down to another company promising lots of stuff like "of course we care for your privacy!", just like facebook keeps on insisting it does. Syeah right they do.
This, along with NFC and most other non-cash payment systems (hello visa, mastercard), are increasingly just excuses to gather more information than they're entitled to. Sure it's valuable info to them, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to hand it to them. Even if it only saves me that much junk mail and spam, I'll keep my name and address to myself, and they can keep their "valuable offers".
I'm not sure, but I think I prefer this idea to that of pulling my phone (card etc..) out and touching to a reader. Partly because of the opt in nature of it. It seems to remove the possibility of an unsavoury character standing a little to close to me on the bus / train, and electronically robbing me with their high gain antennas.
However, I do get the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with this, i just cant put my finger on it....
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