Your fingerprint is your unique identifier, it defines you as separate from every other person in the universe and now, it can double as a method of payment.
In this day and age, where everybody and their brother has a smartphone, the majority of urban areas have some form of broadband or high speed Internet connection and all you need is a few scans of Wikipedia articles to get gain a practical technology know how, as a result, cyber crime is rampant.
Thousands upon thousands of dollars are siphoned from consumers who have purchased items from disreputable online stores and due to the things listed above, it doesn’t take a genius to be able to use someone’s personal info to steal their hard earned cash. Then there’s the added threat of losing a wallet in real life. All of this comes down to the ease of using credit cards, which are the source of all this crime.
As a form of physical property, credit cards are an inconvenience to keep track of and keep tabs on. It’s handy then, that PayTango, a brand new technology start up of alumni from the esteemed Carnegie Melon University, is a newly developed way of paying for things – using fingerprints.
Using a biometric fingerprint scanner and a credit card reader that retails for a figure around $1,500 and $1,700, new PayTango users swipe their finger and their credit card and input their cell number as to register all of the payment details to that one fingerprint.
The PayTango sits alongside the store’s cash register as it plugs right in easily. It’s simple enough for a store to use and it provides an incredibly safe and secure option for consumers to pay for their goods. And while that high price point may put a few store owners off, PayTango say that after 10 weeks of testing the device on the Carnegie Mellon campus, that price will likely decrease.
Because of the low cost for secure purchasing, PayTango say that they will likely charge owners of the device a small, monetary fee, but it’s unclear yet as to whether or not users of the service will have to pay an initial fee for registering their details.
We’ll have to keep tabs on PayTango and as to when it will be rolled out across a wider area, but for now it’s clear that that payment is heading in a new, safe and secure direction.
Source : TechCrunch, PayTango
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