Amazon files selfie pay patent

Amazon has applied last week for a patent that would enable consumers to authenticate a transaction by taking a picture of their face.

„A transaction is authorized using an authentication process that prompts the user to perform an action in view of a camera or sensor. The process identifies the user and verifies that the user requesting the transaction is a living human being. The user is identified using image information which is processed utilizing facial recognition. The device verifies that the image information corresponds to a living human using one or more human-verification processes. The device prompts the user to perform an action to confirm the transaction, and causes the transaction to be performed after verifying performance of the action by the identified user.”, the patent says.

Selfie pay is designed to ease the process of verifying transactions as consumers make more purchases online and via mobile devices. It’s also thought to be more secure that punching in a password or PIN.

As Amazon explains in the filing, facial recognition is more secure than entering passwords, which can be stolen. Entering long passwords, the company says, can also be cumbersome on mobile devices. Instead, Amazon suggests “a computing device might capture an image of a user and analyze that image to attempt to recognize the user using facial recognition software.”

Amazon isn’t the first company to be experimenting with “pay by selfie” technology. MasterCard began testing its facial recognition capabilities in 2015. When making a purchase online from a merchant requiring identity verification, cardholders can authorize transactions by holding up smartphone cameras while as if taking selfies and blinking. MasterCard announced in February that it would be rolling out its ‘selfie pay’ service this summer.

USAA, a financial services organization for U.S. military members and their families, also started utilizing selfies as logins last year, while Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is working on a facial recognition service that would let customers pay for purchases just by looking at a screen.