A Picture Every Time You Buy Something? Mastercard Beta Testing ‘Selfie’ Facial Recognition This Fall

The checkout lines of the future…

So you know how popular “selfies” have become? One new smartphone that just came out is literally even called “The Selfie”. When we visited Seaworld in San Antonio last week, they had a whole booth set up there that sold nothing but selfie sticks, and people cheerfully were buying them and taking selfies throughout the park.

Guess it’s a selfie society.

Well now CNN Money is reporting that Mastercard will beta test its new facial recognition program this fall and it’s all based on the idea of the selfie. Because those pesky passwords are just too darn hard to remember, the new program will ask people to snap a picture of themselves with their smartphones at checkout:

“The new generation, which is into selfies … I think they’ll find it cool. They’ll embrace it,” said Ajay Bhalla, who’s in charge of coming up with innovative solutions for MasterCard’s security challenges.

This is MasterCard’s way of cutting down fraud.

And now we know why selfies have been so encouraged by the Establishment.

On a sidenote, former DARPA head Regina Dugan claims basically the same thing about the electronic authentication tattoos she helped design. The new generation is just going to think it’s so trendy and cool to tag themselves with an electronic barcode tattoo in lieu of a password (skip to her statements around the 1:50 mark about how ten-to-20 year olds will love wearing these tattoos if only to piss off their parents).

Apple and Samsung are also working on fingerprint scanning technology for checkout. As part of drastic rationing measures in Venezuela, some 20,000 fingerprint scanners were installed in the nation’s grocery stores recently.

Whatever the justification, all this biometric tech is making its way here to America, and in the end, it’s all about tracking and tracing everyone. It’s all about collecting your biometrics and databasing you for the coming smart grid and Internet of Things electronic control grid integration. Then again, that’s what Facebook has been about since it’s inception (and likely financial backing by CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel).

But back specifically to Mastercard’s new fraud-reduction plan, can you imagine living in a world where you are waiting to checkout at the store because the guy in front of you has to take his picture for his credit card company before he can complete his purchase? Where everyone does?

Weird.