Mobile Payments Today indicates that Google will provide the McDonalds clerk your mug shot to authorize a payment – but will also test facial recognition software. What a great test bed to determine the efficacy of facial recognition!
“”When you’re ready to pay, you can simply tell the cashier, ‘I’ll pay with Google,'” Bhat wrote. “The cashier will ask for your initials and use the picture you added to your Hands Free profile to confirm your identity.”
Google also will experiment with the use of an in-store camera to automatically confirm a user’s identity based on the app’s profile picture. Bhat wrote that all images captured by this special camera are deleted immediately.”
Of course hands free payments have been tied (and failed) before:
“Google is not the first company to experiment with the idea of hands-free payments.
PayPal and Square each launched their own versions of hands-free payments, although Square shuttered the Square Wallet/Square Order app in early 2015. PayPal in 2013 introduced its own beacon hardware that communicates with the company’s mobile app, enabling merchants to confirm a user’s purchase via the headshot associated with the account.”
We can only hope Google will fund a test bed at McDonalds and Papa Johns that will compare (and train) the accuracy of Google’s face recognition machine learning algorithm versus the clerks – with the cost of a burger or a pizza in the balance.
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
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