Supermarket ’scanners’ get whole new meaning
In a disturbing new development, the Guardian today reports that the Co-Op is introducing ‘payment by fingerprint.’
According to the article “buyers can choose to register their fingerprint with the chain, allowing their identity to be linked to their bank account and store loyalty card. Customers will be able to pay by placing their fingers against a scanner at the checkout.”
The article confirms that the system uses similar technology to that employed at US immigration checkpoints, and it is likely that the same systems will eventually be used in the proposed national ID card database.
This has worrying implications for shoppers if the supermarket could be linked with the ID database. Perhaps you don’t want that salty, fatty pizza for a treat tonight, nor that extra bottle of red wine to celebrate a promotion. Not if you don’t want your health insurers finding out, or your NHS priority to take a tumble. Because the draft Bill will allow the government to let people such as health insurers to have access to your details without your consent, this is not the stuff of futuristic nightmares. This could be happening within the next few years.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:00
Well – the Co-Op is closely aligned to the Labour movement so why should we be suprised thay share the same Big Brother, nanny state tendencies.
March 9th, 2006 at 12:54
So how is this different from the Identity Register being tied in with your credit card information directly through your bank? I don’t see why fingerprints have to be involved to make this a risk; the fingerprint will merely be a biometric link to a bank account anyway.
Needless to say however, that given the total unreliability of biometrics particularly for identification (i.e. “to which of our thousands of customers does this fingerprint beong”) and the consequences of false positives, I’ll be sticking to my plastic.
March 9th, 2006 at 17:44
The reports on this also stated that the technology would not work with everyone. Especially builders who, apparently, wear down their fingerprints.
Hmmm… food for thought if the ID cards ever do become compulsory? I’m wearing down my fingerprints as we speak, as we speak. Suggest others do same.
March 9th, 2006 at 20:01
Fingerprints at the checkout meaning no cash – the next step in the stepping stones game (from debit cards and credit cards) to implement the ‘cashless’ society that the glabalists are drooling all over because it means complete control over the masses.
But, what about a chip under the skin instead? This will be the eventual replacement for the ID cards that the government is going to introduce if it makes them blue in the face trying. By then we’ll pay by swiping our wrists over the reader, the RFID chip implanted under our skin will track us all the way home AND Big Brother will know if we don’t go straight home like good little citizens.
But, on the other hand, it doesn’t have to be like this if we just resist! NOW!
March 9th, 2006 at 21:07
Kate Muir wrote a piece in the Times Magazine on the 3rd about your paying-by-hand-waving idea. She gave a rather entertaining hypothesis about people being trapped in thier homes starving to death having broken the glass coated chips in their hands which triggered the locks on the fridge and the doors.
Want to try it out? Head to the Baja Beach nightclub in Barcelona or Rotterdam and flash your platinum card. They don’t just tag anyone you know.
PS. We are already tracked going home – its called the Oyster card. Have you ever read your own history at one of the kiosks? They know where you sleep
March 9th, 2006 at 22:33
We don’t *all* have Oyster cards! So far as am aware, this is a London thing, right? And not everyone who buys food even has a bank account. In fact, some people can’t *get* bank accounts. And builders, you know those guys with the fingertips that won’t work on biometric readouts … like to be paid in cash. Can’t see that changing. But then nothing ever really does change.
Take your points. If we’re not careful, chips under the skin, or in our teeth, will be the norm in a few years’ time and who knows but the societies of the future may look back on these times as being terribly primitive.
But you see thing is, as a child of the Sixties, I’ve heard it all before. How we’d all live on the moon, wear suits made out of silver foil, float about the ground in a carless world, eat our dinner by taking a couple of pills, have kids grown in pods and delivered to us by robots. None of it happened. Life is much the same as it was in the Sixties only with better architecture and worse traffic jams. Someone still has to do the dusting and wash the clothes. Technology never really changes anything. Not the basics.
And the technology around ID cards won’t work because it simply *cannot* deliver what is being promised. Too ambitious and yet too unfocused as well.
Anyone who’s ever sat in front of a computer for a long time, or spent or spends much of their working life in front of a screen, knows how deeply fallible and flawed technology is. Only a government full of techophiles yet who are also technophobes could put so much faith into something that never fails to fail.
Ihope the ID card scheme falls on its arse long before it has a chance to tag us, follow us, monitor us and scrutinise everything about us, including how many bottles of wine go into our shopping trolleys each week. But remember the pills we were promised for our meals of the future. Remember the silver foil suits and the holidays to Mars. Didn’t happen. And I very much doubt this will either. Especially with so many tekkie types against it working.
November 7th, 2008 at 20:40
This is just great! Fingerprint scanner technology has already been proved to be hackable – just read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column on the subject –
‘You can make a fingerprint image (on glass) more visible by painting over it with some cyanoacrylate adhesive. That’s a posh word for superglue. Photograph that with a digital camera. Improve the contrast in a picture editing program, and print the image on to a transparency sheet, then use that to etch the fingerprint on to a copper-plated printed circuit board (it sounds difficult, but you can buy a beginner’s etching set at Maplin for £10.67). This gives an image with some three-dimensional relief. You can now make your gelatin fingerpad using this as a mould.’
You can even eat the evidence!
Hmmm Now where can I get some fingerprints?
I know…the Supermarket! Maybe I could follow some rich-looking person or maybe even an MP around Waitrose and pick up the bottle of wine they looked at, some plastic-wrapped meat product they put back, dust it and get a nice impression.
Not that I would ever condone such a thing….that would be simply stealing someone’s ID from them wouldn’t it?
February 20th, 2009 at 10:45
Отлично,когда знаешь точно чего хочешь. Тут нужна объективность.
July 20th, 2009 at 11:39
Soon we going to have to give DNA samples, and then when they start cloning people we will have to figure out the next step. Maybe good old cash is still king. Now they scan you ID, your passport, your drivers license pretty much everything you own and all your personal info lives on a computer somewhere and soon Google is going to have your medical records… whats next