Verify payments with a selfie

We were convinced that selfies were a thing of the past but, while your friends might be giving you a hard time on Social Media, companies seem to have picked up on the power of our narcissistic tendencies.

MasterCard is in the process of conducting a survey among 500 of their customers to see whether it is feasible to verify payments with a selfie. They are hoping that the survey will answer two questions before they can implement the new system.

Firstly they want to investigate selfie penetration across generations and secondly they want to find out what privacy concerns consumers might have with regards to sharing facial data. Believe it or not, that girl who shares three selfies a day on Facebook might be concerned about sharing her personal data – would she be okay with sharing her selfies with businesses?

Verify payments with a selfie

It would stand to reason that this system would have a better chance of succeeding if they only targeted Millennials as studies show that 55% of the generation share selfies online on a regular basis.

I am all for progress but I do not like this idea at all. Can you imagine standing in your favourite store paying with your card and all of a sudden instead of the store employee asking you for your pin, they ask you to take a selfie. What if the selfie is at a funny angle or you are having a makeup free day and the system does not recognise you? Then what?

I don’t know about you, but I am quite happy with having to verify my payments with a pin.

Source: http://thefuturescompany.com/

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