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Pay By Touch Goes Online
Max Fomitchev writes to tell us that Pay By Touch, the biometric identification service, has announced an online version of their service. While currently the only implementation of this service is in the brick-and-mortar storefront of Star Markets grocery stores, the company hopes that online vendors will start signing up soon.
Finally, the world of "Back to the Future" is coming to us! Now if I can just get that hoverboard I've always wanted....
What about strip clubs?
FTFA: "allows making online purchases with a slide of a dinger across the scanner" (emphasis mine)
really.. a dinger..? you don't say...
The whole fingerprint-for-payment-at-the-store thing has been debated here plenty before, so i'll steer clear of it.. but TFA (well, TFblogpost) is centered around Pay By Touch launching a service that lets you scan your fingerprint at home and autopay at various online websites with a simple swipe of your finger. I don't know who steered them down this path, but they should be fired.. promptly.
I can recall several dotbombs that had this same business model (an e-wallet that had all your info in it already so all you needed to do was purchase from participating vendors and a username/password/whatever was all you'd need to make each purchase), and they all failed miserably. Anyone remember flooz? Maybe i'm just a cynic and these guys will have a fresh new approach that will catch on like wildfire.. but it seems a nonstarter to me, since none of the failed dotcoms so much as required you to have a biometric scanner in your home.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Inevitably, this issue will come up. Traditionally, if your credit card or bank card is compromised, you can simply cancel it and acquire a new one but what about biomatric data used for identification ?
They say: "Your finger is unique to you, which means only you can access your financial accounts. The Pay By Touch service helps protect you from physical or identity theft. Because there's nothing to carry, there's nothing to be lost or stolen."
Really?
What about the fingerprint information you're evidently (there's nothing to carry) sending over the wire? No way to intercept that huh? How about the fingerprints you leave on just about everything you touch? No way to lift those off of that surface and to use them on a scanner, in the case of on-line purchases, a scanner that's right there beside you without anyone looking over your shoulder to see you're actually using your own finger and not some copy made out of gummy bears.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I mean how do we know that fingerprints are 100% unique? And what if someone finds a way to abuse the system? I think this will just be to open unecessary doors for abuse.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
I figure it to be a biological dongle
Where were you when the voynix came?
For a system like this to be feasible there needs to be a centralized, secure storage of financial information by a large, secure, and reputable financial institution with nationwide access to merchants and customers. The system itself also needs to be exponentially better protected from fraud and theft than the current system, and at least equally convenient.
There's many reasons I suspect this program is destined for failure, but most obviously, the threat of a middle man attack by a malicious website. I mean, if you want to be a major financial institution, then why bother storing login information for websites?
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
Why do people seek convenient ways of giving their money to someone else? You worked hard for it, it should be hard to get rid of it too.
This isn't directly related to the topic at hand, but my collection of people's fingers also goes 'online' today.
I needed a hobby and a little more cash, this should solve both of those problems.
finger prints are quite cool in real life, cos they can produce random numbers but with common features that can be identified. They also have a prescence-thats a bit hard to explain, but imagine going into a shop, approaching the cashier and saying you've left your cc at home.. its ok tho, cos u remember the number and they can just type it into the till manually.
:)
:D
go on, try it
When we're transmitting over the web, it becomes just a number we're sending, a number which can be intercepted, saved, stored or faked. In the same way firefox automatically puts my password into boxes online, it wont be long before you dont need to actually swipe your finger, just access a saved copy, then it just becomes a fancier, longer password.
No system where the method of scanning is given to home users will ever be fraud proof. i personally think this system is poorly thought out. if you dont like typing in your cc, there are lots of programs which will run alongside browsers and automatically input your details.
--All that and i dont even mind my fingerprints being held on file.. i cant wait to see how the data protection fanatics jump on this one
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
You're almost describing the EMV (Europay MasterCard VISA) standard for smart cards, implemented in the UK as Chip & PIN. The chip on the smart card is used during the encryption process and cardholder presense verified by a PIN, which is encrypted on the numberpad, before it gets any further (thus providing two factor authentication.
It has drawbacks, direct and indirect observation of the PIN plus it doesn't stop card cloning, as the mag strip still exists. Indeed specially rigged readers were used this year in petrol stations to capture the mag strip and save the card information where it ended up being cloned in India.
doesn't anyone else find that a bit disgusting to have at supermarkets?
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Star Markets may be the only stores in the U.K., but in the U.S. the cub foods and Jewel/Osco chains both have deployed Pay By Touch. That's a fairly significant foot print, at least near Chicago.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
If there is a fraudulent transaction, and someone can argue (albeit wrongly) "the only way the transaction could have happened is with your fingerprint" - won't this make it harder to dispute a charge?
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Stars Market isn't the only one. We have this in all the Jewels around our area.
First it starts as a convenience somewhere, catches on with all the dumb lazy citizens, then becomes ubiquitous, then it becomes mandatory!
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Dwight D. Eisenhower
You leave a pass to your bank account on everything you touch.
WorldPay, backed by the Royal Bank of Scotland, is gaining ground on PayPal (in the UK at least)and it's fairly easy to use except that unlike PayPal it refuses to store card details so you have to go to the bother of fishing your cc out of your wallet every time.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
One thing that worries me is at what point are you rich enough for somone to cut your finger off? What I don't like is that it's kind of like assimilating your financial standing with your physical body.
That seems wrong on plenty of levels, the simplest of which is that when someone mugs you, conventional wisdom says that unless you're far more prepared than they are, you give them everything you have. When 'everything you have' begins to include your right index finger, then mugging is way easier in a crowded subway with a pair of garden clippers.
Yeeeow. I'd rather be poor. I'd rather use cash. I'd rather have a placeholder for value that a)is not protected by the government thereby predicating their automatic involvement (I don't like them all that much, and the more they stay out of my business, the better. If a friend steals something from me, I'll resolve it within my community), and b)someone can steal reasonably easy without hurting me. Money's just money. And as long as this doesn't become the dominant way to purchase things, making other systems obsolete, I'd be OK with it, because I ain't f-ing using it.
"Hey honey? Take my finger to the 7-11 and get me a pack of cigarrettes, would you?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Everyone seems to be trying to find the obvious flaws in a system like that. Truth is, it really is easy to get around some system that just checks the print for itself. However, there's a lot more to check than just the print. The easiest would be warmth, then electrical current, although they're also easy to bypass. Put some more checks in and bypassing it feels a lot more difficult, for instance, pulsation and oxygenation.
Pay By Touch
Great name !
the biometric identification service,
Yeah... it sounded to kinky to be true....
I think I'm much more likely to trust a non-net version fingerprint reader, like the ones that are shipping with many laptops now.
Many of those have "password managers" that will get you into your money/email/Windows/whatever by swiping your finger, and the fingerprint information never goes across the internet. Plus it has the added bonus of working with a lot more than just these guys' proprietary system.
-David
So what happens when a corrupt CIA/NSA programmer decides that he needs some extra money, spends a couple seconds to write an app to feed data from the CIA fingerprint database, and proceeds to embezzle millions of dollars? It'd be laughably easy to do, as the CIA database probably contains more datapoints/fingerprint than a system a commercial endevour is going to use.
Biometrics are a bad idea if they are the only form of confirmation, the same way the PIN numbers or signatures are laughably weak on their own. However, as an added layer of protection, it seems like a good idea, as long as it isn't mandatory.
Thieves chop man's finger off to defeat biometric car
Green Hills, a Syracuse NY grocery store also uses Pay By Touch. It's one store only, not a chain. They like to brag about Inc. Magazine naming them the best little grocery store in America.
Not sure how long they've had it. It's part of their "SmartShop" program that also creates custom discounts and shopping lists personalized based on your previous purchases. They seem very advanced in that type of stuff, and it has helped them create a very loyal customer base.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
You can pay-by-touch at Jewel grocery stores too.
Just to make the machine seem more appealing, why not make it say things like "Ooooo baby, I love the way that feels.", "Oh yes! Right there, God that feels good!", "No, not there, just a little lower. A little lower."
Contrarly, and with much humor, the opposite should also be stated: "What? You are just going to leave me like that?", "You're in love with the other machine in 12-items or less! You bastard!", "Sure you'll commit to buying that 12-pack of beer. It's just too bad you'll never commit to our relationship!" "That's right! Go back home to your blow up girlfriend! It's not like I matter to you. I'm just the checkout machine! What are you looking at? I'm not in the mood to check out groceries right now. Go ask that human clerk in lane 5 to bag your groceries."
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Piggly Wiggly, a fairly big regional chain here in the Southeast, has offered Pay By Touch for well over a year.
..Also in Cub Foods (for sure) and Rainbow Foods(I think) in Minnesota.