Pay By Touch

Give This Machine The Finger

Getting Really Personal at the Checkout Counter

ABIGAIL REIDER / SANfrancisco 1sep2005

The San Francisco based company Pay By Touch is leading the latest retail revolution, hoping to make cash, credit cards, and long lines obsolete by putting the power in the hands of the consumer—literally. With the touch of a finger, new scanning devices will allow Bay Area shoppers to leave their wallets at home.

By scanning your fingertip at the checkout counter, you can automatically access your bank or credit accounts, and even verify your age and ID, which are centrally stored on Pay By Touch's server. The Pay By Touch company has already installed the machines in hundreds of supermarkets throughout the country, including Oregon, Minnesota, and some of the South, and by the end of the year it plans to expand into grocery stores in the Bay Area.

Merchants are excited about the invention because it can cut the cost of each transaction by two-thirds. But some shoppers are wary in light of the growing concerns about identity theft. The folks at Pay By Touch, however, claim their system will actually prevent problems: "Pay By Touch protects shoppers' privacy by making it harder to steal their credit cards," says company spokesperson Shannon Riordan. The system analyzes and records 40 different data points of the fingerprint and encrypts the information, making it impossible to steal—unlike a stolen credit card, which can be used with just a forged signature.

Still, not everyone's convinced. "Giving up your privacy for a little convenience doesn't make a whole lot of sense," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco technology and civil liberties watchdog group. "There are serious concerns involved with having so much personal information owned and stored by one company."

And yet, with much of our information already just a Google search away, there's something to be said for adding a little James Bond to that routine grocery run.

The future is now: these new high-tech biometric devices will soon be at supermarkets everywhere.