1 May 2010

France to trial biometric payment with finger scanners in shops

Shoppers in France could soon be able to use their finger to pay for everyday shopping, in a move that aims to tackle fraud and speed up supermarket queues.
High-street bank Accord has been given permission by the French data protection authorities to start a six-month trial into the new biometric payment system.

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The idea had been rejected by the Commission Nationale Informatique et Liberté on several occasions in the past because of fears that storing fingerprint data posed a privacy and security risk.
However the new system developed by Accord records the unique pattern of veins underneath a person's index finger - not the fingerprint itself.

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