Amazon Patent Would Let You Pay By Using a Selfie

Use that million dollar smile of yours to pay for your $5 online purchase.

Doesn’t get frustrating sometimes trying to remember all your passwords for online banking or e-commerce? Yes, we have password managers, but things just seem to be getting more complicated as hacking gets more sophisticated.

Amazon is hoping to remedy that by letting people take a selfie to pay for their online purchases, at least if they are granted the patent they are seeking for their selfie technology.

The idea behind it is that storing passwords on your mobile device can be problematic if the phone is ever lost or stolen. And turning away from friends to enter your password can be a bit embarrassing. So taking a selfie as a way of authentication would make for safer identification and better cybersecurity. In addition, the tech would prompt the user to do something like “blink your right eye,” which would help preclude would-be thieves from holding up a static picture in front of the camera during the facial recognition process.

This isn’t the first time that this has been proposed, as Alibaba chairman Jack Ma demoed similar technology in March last year. And MasterCard will be rolling out its own system in the next few months.

Source: Re/Code