Ryan works at the American headquarters for FingerTec, a Malaysian company replacing PINs, usernames, and typed passwords with fingers and faces we don’t need to memorize.
“You can’t copy someone’s fingerprint unless you chop it off,” Ryan said, “which wouldn’t work because it has to be attached to a hand.”
For now, biometric security is not being forced on people. If you want to avoid it, you can.
But eventually, once it has been adopted on a widespread basis, banks and government agencies will start requiring it.
And it is easy to imagine a day when none of us will any longer be able to buy or sell anything without submitting to biometric identification. In fact, an “alternative payment method” involving hand scanning is already being tested in southern Sweden…
Hand scanning has become an alternative payment method for people in a city in southern Sweden, researchers at Lund University said Monday.
Vein scanning terminals have been installed in 15 shops and restaurants in Lund thanks to an engineering student who came up with the idea two years ago while waiting in line to pay.
Some 1,600 people have signed up already for the system, which its creator says is not only faster but also safer than traditional payment methods.
“Every individual’s vein pattern is completely unique, so there really is no way of committing fraud with this system,” researcher Fredrik Leifland said in a statement.
“You always need your hand scanned for a payment to go through.”
But before biometric identification is widely used for payment systems, we will probably see it implemented in a whole bunch of other ways first. For instance, biometric scanners are already being used in dining halls on college campuses all across America…