The future of payment seamless, invisible, is looking out. A revolution that eliminates the need to carry cash or credit cards and avoids waiting and issuing difficulties. One of these is the payment with facial recognition, a system recently adopted by the Moscow metro, for the first time in the world with the Face Pay system, introduced to speed up entry flows.
A system that has already alarmed supporters of Russian privacy and beyond. The concrete fear is that the images used for access to the subway turnstiles are also exploited to control the movements of individual subjects by the Russian authorities. Moscow is already in the crosshairs of some governments and various international organizations for the respect of democratic rules.
The same technology appears to have found a new use in Britain where nine North Ayrshire schools in Scotland have introduced payment with facial recognition for the school canteen. The technology was chosen to reduce queues and as an anti-COVID measure (previously they used a fingerprint scanner).
According to Crb Cunninghams, the company that installed the system, the transaction takes just five seconds per student, cutting down waiting time and queues. “With facial recognition, pupils simply select the meal, look at the camera and leave, speeding up the lunch service by eliminating any contact at the point of sale,” reads a brochure distributed to parents by schools.
How does it work
When the pupil approaches the camera, the system compares the “digital signature” obtained from the facial features with that stored on the server. On the security front, Crb Cunninghams reassures skeptics: “The data is protected by AES 256-bit encryption and deleted when the pupil leaves school,” reads a note. No data therefore remains on the server.