I came across a piece of news (on the BBC website) about customers in Germany being able to pay in shops with their fingerprints. The journalist explains at the start of the film that your fingerprints will need to be registered in order that you can use them as a sort of debit card, although he doesn't explain exactly how this works. This does have obvious benefits in that you can't lose your fingerprints like you can money or cards, and fraud would be quite difficult unless spy thriller films are to be believed.Watch the video here
I decided to find more articles about payment by fingerprint and there are apparently some branches of the Co-op around Oxford which use this technology:
I am rather sceptical as to whether this is actually real, but if not it is rather scary; science fiction becoming reality.
I do wonder about the last part of the article regarding the Oxford Co-ops:
Builders could have problems because the manual work wears down their fingerprints and surgeons face similar problems because of all the hand-washing they do.
Can you really wear you fingerprints away through excessive handwashing and manual labour? I feel this needs more investigation.
Image from BBC news website. Address above.
1 comment:
This works.
However, retinal scans are probably more accurate and likely in the future, but then again, we will probably have the technology to do dna scans easily by then.
This is really scary stuff, mainly because it gives a limited number of people a massive amount of control over what we can and cannot do. The ultimate surveillance society and not the kind of place I would like to live in.
Have you watched Minority Report and The Matrix? If you have not read 1984, do so!
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