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The tech giant is creating checkout terminals that could be placed in bricks-and-mortar stores and allow shoppers to link their card information to their hands, according to people familiar with the matter. They could then pay for purchases with their palms, without having to pull out a card or phone.

From Cash, Plastic or Hand? Amazon Envisions Paying With a Wave – WSJ:

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Employees at Amazon’s New York offices are serving as guinea pigs for the biometric technology, using it at a handful of vending machines to buy such items as sodas, chips, granola bars and phone chargers, according to sources briefed on the plans.

The high-tech sensors are different from fingerprint scanners found on devices like the iPhone and don’t require users to physically touch their hands to the scanning surface.

Instead, they use computer vision and depth geometry to process and identify the shape and size of each hand they scan before charging a credit card on file.

The system, code-named “Orville,” will allow customers with Amazon Prime accounts to scan their hands at the store and link them to their credit or debit card.

From Amazon testing payment system that uses hands as ID:

 

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Meanwhile, 16 years ago, 

Pay By Touch, San Francisco, announced last week that Piggly Wiggly Carolina had adopted its fingerprint-payment system, which replaces cards and checks with a network that links fingerprint scanners at the point of sale to a database of payment accounts designated by customers.

From Why Piggly Wiggly Went with Biometric Payments – Digital Transactions:

 

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Based on positive customer response to a four-store pilot, Piggly Wiggly Carolina here will roll out a biometric point-of-sale payment system to the rest of its 83 company stores by May.

From PIGGLY WIGGLY TO ROLL OUT BIOMETRIC PAYMENT TO 83 STORES:

 

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Firms need to take action now as new Fifth Money Laundering Directive rules aimed at tackling money-laundering came into force today (Friday 10 January). These place increased importance on the acceptable use of electronic verification methods in confirming identity, without the need for passports or utility bills.

The Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive – Ready or Not
Consequently all financial services firms, solicitors, accountants, estate agents and now also letting agents not currently using electronic verification, need to re-evaluate their customer due diligence processes. Electronic verification is a far more robust, cost-effective method of Know Your Customer (KYC).
The new regulations recognise the latest technological developments and clearly state that regulated businesses can use electronic verification instead of traditional methods of KYC such as passports, driving licences and utility bills. Since 2004, firms have been able to use electronic verification, but the latest regulations are explicit in that firms can use this method as their sole basis of client verification.

From New Fifth Money Laundering Directive rules come into force:

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Property rights classically entail three elements: usus, fructus, abusus—that is, the rights to use, profit from and dispose of property. The principle of fructus would allow us to be compensated for the value of our data, thus forcing Facebook and others to pay us for the raw material we provide. This is not so much “financialisation” as it is a fair rebalancing of the economic value chain. We would move from today’s digital feudalism, where the lord gives us free services in exchange for all the data that is harvested, to proper capitalism based on contractual terms. As always, property rights protect the individual against the abuse of central power.

But then there is also usus and abusus. Property rights allow individuals to ignore the market. Nobody forces you to sell your house, even if you underexploit it. The same applies to data: through a personal data wallet, we would decide which data we are willing to share, with whom, to which end and under what conditions. Platforms would have to accept our terms and conditions, not the other way around.

From Open Future – A cry for freedom in the algorithmic age | Open Future | The Economist:

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The rehabilitation of free will depends on us re-appropriating our data. Today we are digital serfs, giving up the data we produce in exchange for free services, of questionable value, provided by our new overlords. We post a billion photos a day on Facebook. Yes, a billion. Once processed by algorithms (that increasingly include facial recognition), this treasure trove of data generates quarterly profits in the order of billions of dollars for Facebook.

What percentage goes to the original producer? Zero. Not only can we not negotiate with our lord the use of our data, but like the peasants of yore, we are prohibited from selling it on the market, too.

From Open Future – A cry for freedom in the algorithmic age | Open Future | The Economist:

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His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.

From The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It – The New York Times:

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A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

From The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It – The New York Times:

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The Canberra Times reports that in Milton on the south coast of New South Wales, residents and holiday makers were forced to queue outside the local supermarket to buy food and water following a power cut. Customers were let in one by one and were only allowed six items during the outage. Customers paid in cash only and staff calculated totals using calculators.

From Bushfires remind Australians of the Importance of Cash – Cash Essentials:

How strange. None of the staff had mobile phones? Why not just take a picture of the customers’ card and the key them in manually later. Or use Android mobile phones and a “PIN on glass” POS to take payments since all Aussie cards are contactless. Or have people pay with PayPal or any other mobile wallet service. Making people go to ATMs to get cash in these difficult circumstances is ridiculous.

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The CEO of AVSecure, Stuart Lawley, a British tech entrepreneur who made his fortune in the dotcom boom, said he had personally “lost millions” creating the technology.

He said the company, which is behind other parental control apps such as Ageblock, had been preparing for up to 10 million people signing up for the service on day one.

From Tech companies launch legal action to force Government to bring in under 18s porn ban:

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Four age verification companies lodged a judicial review at the High Court Thursday challenging the Culture Secretary’s decision to shelve the scheme to impose age checks on all porn sites viewed in the UK.

The Telegraph understands the companies are arguing the decision was an “abuse of power” as the move had been approved by parliament. They are also claiming damages, understood to be in the region of £3 million, for losses sustained developing age verification technology.

The age verification scheme was initially passed as part of the Digital Economy Act in December 2018 and mandated that all adult sites had to have age checks proving UK users were over 18. However, its implementation was repeatedly delayed throughout 2019.

In October, Culture Secretary Baroness Nicky Morgan announced she was suspending the age check scheme and would look to incorporate it into proposed online harms legislation that aims to create a new online regulator. The Government has said it aims to publish draft legislation this year, but it could take two to three years before the regulator is up and running.

From Tech companies launch legal action to force Government to bring in under 18s porn ban:

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Lawmakers and activists are proposing a digital payment platform and currency to help millions of New Yorkers without bank accounts.

From New York Is Proposing the Creation of a ‘Public Venmo’ – VICE:

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