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The financial services firm is rolling out biometric technologies that will allow European consumers to authenticate their identity without a password, but with a selfie, in order to provide customers with a more convenient method to sign in and a faster checkout process. Security firms view the development as another sign of the mainstream availability of biometric authentication, comparing it to the introduction of TouchID fingerprint authentication technology in the iPhone.
Javvad Malik, security advocate at enterprise security tools firm AlienVault, said that "selfie pay" is seemingly an attempt to bridge the gap between a fully authenticated method, such as chip and PIN – and unauthenticated payments methods such as contactless.
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Mastercard Will Roll Out Pay-by-Selfie Across Europe
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday October 06 2016, @12:53AM
The relevant question here ought to be whether or not this is more secure than the current system. Nobody has invented a method of verification that is completely impossible to crack, it's just that some are easier than others. Showing up in person is generally quite reliable, except in cases where you've got an identical twin or they can find somebody that looks and sounds like you that they can train to act and think like you as well.
Obviously, that's incredibly unlikely, but it's technically possible. I'm sure there's even folks that share fingerprints, especially given that fingerprint scanners usually don't attempt to match absolutely every aspect of the fingerprint in the first place.
OTOH, selfies are a particularly bad idea as you've got to store that biometric data somewhere and it has to be accurate enough to just let the right person in, but inaccurate enough that if you've got more stubble than usual you can still get in.