Putting a face to a name
PayPal is testing a system in a dozen shops in the London Borough of Richmond which allows customers to pay for goods using a smartphone but with the twist that the shop assistant verifies their identity from a photograph.
So how does it work? When the shopper gets to the till, they use the app on their iPhone or Android phone to check-in with the store and tap a couple of buttons to authorise a payment from their Paypal account. The shop assistant is then presented with a photo of the Paypal account holder on their screen and asked to verify that the person in front of them is the same person as in the photograph. If it is, they tap a key on their device and the transaction is completed.
Whilst that may sound like a foolproof two-factor authentication scheme, there are reservations. Humans are good at quickly recognising faces of people they do know, but poor at matching faces to photos of people they don't know, and machine facial recognition is really not much better. We've all looked at passport or driving license photos and shuddered, wondering how anyone would recognise us from our picture. We change our hair colour and style, we grow beards and moustaches, we sometimes wear glasses. Trained immigration officers at airports struggle to confirm identities from passport photos, so why should we expect supermarket checkout staff to give us the level of accuracy required? We also know from the pre-PIN days when credit cards needed signatures that no matter how much your scrawl differed from the exemplar on the back of the card, that shop assistants almost never queried it, that it was easier to avoid confrontation and just ring up the sale.
Shops which are taking part in the trial report it is a quick and easy system to use, and an underlying theme of the PayPal promotion is whilst people often leave their wallets and cash in the office, no-one ever goes out without their phone. Give people a quick and easy way to pay for things by phone and they won't need to carry a wallet around at all. Although the trial is centred on twelve shops in Richmond, PayPal hopes to roll it out to around 2000 shops nationwide by the end of the year, and is somewhat optimistically predicting mobiles will become the normal way of paying for things by 2016.
28th August 2013
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.