Selfie generation, Mastercard is looking at you. Facial recognition technology may soon be used to verify payments.

Are you one of those people who tend to forget their PIN numbers far too often? Good news! MasterCard invited 500 pilot users to test a new biometric security payment method. Instead of entering PIN numbers they will now take a photo and use a mobile app to verify payment. According to Google, young people today (and plenty of social media savvy adults) take over 100 million selfies every single day, so MasterCard's idea isn't altogether unexpected.

To sum up, you are only required to stare at your mobile phone camera for a couple of seconds and then blink to confirm your identity and authenticate payment. Yes, a blink is supposed to prevent hackers from stealing your face using, for example, a photo of you. During the testing phase users will need to verify their payments with fingerprints, an additional ID identification.

Paying with your selfies seems to be fun and almost too simple, which immediately makes us wonder, how safe is it really. Creating an animated photograph, which simulates a blink, is not exactly rocket science, so experts are rightfully raising their eyebrows, recommending that selfies should only be used when and if teamed up with additional security mechanisms.

The possibility of having your personal identity stolen is too great to be ignored. Afterall, you can always revoke a PIN number, but you only got one face and one set of unique fingerprints.

July 7, 2015 Living photo: MasterCard

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