As China embraces facial payment technology, purchasing has become as simple as smiling at a screen. Customers now don’t need any kind of e-wallet, credit cards or cash to make their purchase. With this new technology becoming a part of their daily lives, even QR codes might go obsolete for the China market. Beijing is known for its state-of-the-art innovations and technology which makes lives of its users easier.
In a full blown report, AFP has shown how China is making use of this technology, not only to make the lives of e-commerce easy, but has also made use of it in nabbing criminals, track dissidents and even monitor senior citizens. So, the thought from the sci-fi movie, Minority Report is actually coming true.
Customers are supposed to simply make a purchase by posing in front of point-of-sale (POS) machines equipped with cameras. Facial Payment Technology works when you have linked an image of your face to a digital payment system or bank account you hold.
With everything new and innovative, there are certain grey areas to always look out for. For example, with all that is good about this technology, there are glitches and thoughts about how the State could misuse citizen data.
Commenting on this, Adam Ni, China researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney said to the concerned media that he sees a “big risk where the state could use this data for their own purposes, such as surveillance, monitoring, the tracking of political dissidents, social and information control, ethnic profiling, as in the case with Uighurs in Xinjiang, and even predictive policing.”
