Cashless Society: China’s KFC Introduces Facial Recognition Payment System
By Nicholas West
ActivistPost.com
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
Step by step, facial recognition has been accepted by the general public for security; its appearance is proliferating at airports and at train stations around the world. With that acclimatization in full swing, facial recognition is also becoming a preference in the name of convenience as it is being adopted for conference check-ins and other events. Logically, the next incarnation purports security and convenience in the form of biometric payments using facial recognition.
Reuters reports that an upscale version of KFC, known locally as KPRO, is a testing ground.
Diners at a KFC store in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou will have a new way to pay for their meal. Just smile.
Customers will be able to use a “Smile to Pay” facial recognition system at the tech-heavy, health-focused concept store, part of a drive by Yum China Holdings Inc to lure a younger generation of consumers.
Yum China, which spun off from its U.S. parent Yum Brands Inc last year, is trying to rev up growth in the world’s second largest economy, where food safety scares and changing consumer tastes have dented sales since 2012.
Yum is still the largest fast food chain in the market, where it has over 7,685 outlets. Its China same-store sales have also been slowly improving, rising in the second quarter of the year on a strong showing by its KFC brand.
[…]
Diners can pay by scanning their faces at an ordering kiosk and entering a phone number – which is meant to guard against people cheating the system.
“Combined with a 3D camera and liveness detection algorithm, Smile to Pay can effectively block spoofing attempts using other people’s photos or video recordings and ensure account safety,” Jidong Chen, Ant’s director of biometric identification technology, said in a statement.
As I wrote in 2014, the move to give everyone a global unique ID that can be verified across nearly all human activity has been in the works for some time. The principle behind this is that YOU are the password of the future.
The Rest…HERE
