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posted by CoolHand on Thursday April 23 2015, @05:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the ultimate-biometrics-for-us dept.

Amir Mizroch reports at the WSJ that a PayPal executive who works with engineers and developers to find and test new technologies, says that embeddable, injectable, and ingestible devices are the next wave in identification for mobile payments and other sensitive online interactions. Jonathon Leblanc says that identification of people will shift from “antiquated” external body methods like fingerprints, toward internal body functions like heartbeat and vein recognition, where embedded and ingestible devices will allow “natural body identification.” Ingestible devices could be powered by stomach acid, which will run their batteries and could detect glucose levels and other unique internal features can use a person’s body as a way to identify them and beam that data out. Leblanc made his remarks during a presentation called Kill all Passwords that he’s recently started giving at various tech conferences in the U.S. and Europe, arguing that technology has taken a huge leap forward to “true integration with the human body.” But the idea has its skeptics. What could possibly go wrong with a little implanted device that reads your vein patterns or your heart's unique activity or blood glucose levels writes AJ Vicens? "Wouldn't an insurance company love to use that information to decide that you had one too many donuts—so it won't be covering that bypass surgery after all?"

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:15AM (#174222)

    Does that mean that Windows will no longer recognize me as being me, and decline to boot?

    Or the ATM will not recognize you and decline to give you money.

    And be sure that as soon as a significant fraction of people have it, other uses of it will be found. For example, storing your medical data on it; after all, wouldn't it be great if at an emergency, the doctor would be guaranteed to get the important data from a device that you're guaranteed to have with you? Well, unless someone hacked in and modified that data …

    Or maybe it will one day double as credit card. In that case, I suggest implanting in either the right hand (easiest handling) or in the forehead (a part of the body you are unlikely to lose in a non-deadly accident). ;-)