MasterCard wants UK customers to pose 'n pay, with a new feature called Selfie Pay
People, we will no longer have to suffer the inconvenience of handling coins and cash (ew) to pay for items IRL, because now paying for stuff with our faces is officially a thing.
And no, it doesn’t mean your flawlessly made-up face will get you out of spending any actual money (that privilege only extends to the Kardashians), it’s actually the latest technology from MasterCard, which allows cardholders to provide an image of their face to verify their identity when completing online payments.
Called 'Selfie Pay’, the feature looks set to hit the UK and 14 other countries this summer and uses facial mapping software plus customer finger prints to identify you when you pay for stuff on your phone. So yep, taking a selfie in public might just become a whole lot more acceptable.
You’ll also get to skip that annoying second security prompt that wrecks your head when you think you’ve completed a payment, as MasterCard’s latest feature will supplement the ‘SecureCode’ section of online payments. So kiss goodbye to remembering the 8th, 12th and 52nd characters of your 7th password - hurrah!
The tech works by instructing customers to first download a special selfie-app that then creates and stores a digital map of your face on the MasterCard servers, so when you complete a payment all you have to do is look at your phone's camera or use your fingerprint.
According to engadget, the app will require you to blink when taking the selfie which is the software needs to verify that you are indeed yourself, and which will also prevent people trying to trick the app by holding up a picture of someone else, for example.
This is the latest strategy to combat credit card fraud across the UK, and while we're in favour of anything that protects our hard earned cash from being nicked from under our noses, it's extremely strange to think of the amount of personal data that is stored on a huge digital server somewhere in the clouds. If MasterCard were to get hacked, not only would thieves have our card details, address and money, but they'd also have access to our fingerprints and facial images - it gives us shivers just thinking about it...
But since we're already so good at snapping selfies, we reckon this is one fraud-fighting feature that's going to be extremely popular with millennials.