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 |  Subject: Payment in the palm of your hand  Tue Feb 04, 2014 11:47 am | |
| Payment in the palm of your handBiometric identification could cut out credit cards – and even wallets A woman registers her palm on a PulseWallet, a point-of-purchase device, during the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month. Photograph: Steve Marcus/ReutersUsing your biometric data as a method of identification is commonplace these days. Once the territory of high-security facilities in movies, now it’s in everything from your laptop to your mobile phone.Passports contain biometric data to verify your identity. Samsung uses facial recognition in its Samsung Galaxy smartphones to unlock the devices; Apple recently implemented a fingerprint reader as a way to access the iPhone 5S.Tech firm Facebanx have proclaimed passwords will be a thing of the past thanks to a system it had developed that authenticates users through voice and facial recognition.Biometrics, or the identification of humans by their characteristics or traits, is nothing new. Back in 2010, a French bank was given permission to run a six-month trial on a payments system using fingerprints to authenticate shoppers, with four banks running the trial in 2012. And several schools in the past couple of years have introduced cashless systems for paying for lunches through linking fingerprints and palm prints to payment information.Biometrics has been presrented as the best way to protect user information, but they can often fail. Poor light, for example, makes facial recognition difficult. A cut on the finger renders a fingerprint unreadable. And that’s before you get into the potential ways around the security measures, forcing users to provide the correct biometrics sample through several means, some more gruesome than others.
The way forward
But things may be moving on. Unveiled at CES, Pulse Wallet is being touted as the way forward for securing your private information. Based on Fujitsu’s Palm Secure technology, the system may be available for commercial users as early as next month.The technology was shown off at the Fujitsu forum last November. The demonstration involved linking a travel card – in this case a train ticket – to a user’s biometric information.The system reads your vein pattern, a biometric identifier tougher to replicate than previous authentication methods, and compares it against a pre-registered pattern to verify your identity.It pulses an infrared signal through your hand, which, for the reader, turns the veins darker, enabling them to be read. It needs an active blood flow to deliver a positive result, which will then allow you to pay for an item or use your rail ticket.If it all goes to plan, the new log-in method could be used for anything from swiping your hand across a scanner to pay for your shopping to logging in to your PC.
Stored in the cloud
The ultimate aim is to eliminate the need to carry credit cards, issue paper receipts or even carry a wallet. The information is stored in the cloud ready for access when needed.But despite being pencilled in for a commercial release this year, Palm Secure has been in development for several years, and the technology itself is based on two decades of Fujitsu’s work in image recognition. |
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