While in Italy electronic payments are only about 14 percent of total payments, in other parts of the world they are already working on how to overcome them: in China, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, payments with recognition are beginning to spread. facial, which should gradually replace not only card payments but also those with smartphones (which in Italy have begun to be seen for just two years).
There are two companies that have developed this technology and want to compete for primacy on this type of payments: Tencent, which you may have already heard of as the owner of WeChat, and the Alibaba group, which owns the largest e-commerce site. in the world. Both companies have platforms to pay with smartphones widely used in China, namely WeChat Pay and Alipay: the latter is used by about 700 million Chinese and was the first to install facial recognition in stores, starting last year. December, followed by WeChat Pay in March.
These payment systems are essentially devices equipped with cameras, which scan the biometric data of the registered customer's face and then compare them with those already in possession of the payment platforms. Alipay, for example, has been using facial recognition for user login for years (similar to what newer iPhones have), so a photo is also associated with the bank account. Alipay assures that the system is almost impossible to fool: the platform's facial recognition is able to distinguish the differences of two homozygous twins and has a very low margin of error. According to Jidong Chen, manager of a company linked to Alibaba, the accuracy of the recognition is 99.8 percent.
In addition to the doubts about the security of this system, there are others that obviously concern privacy. To popularize facial recognition as a payment method, Alipay and WeChat have partnered with various companies, including the Marriott hotel chain, but it is unclear whether the biometric data of customers' faces is shared with partners or stored in some way. from the shops. According to a survey by an association linked to the Chinese central bank, 70 percent of users using electronic forms of payment cited the security of their personal data as a major concern. Other users, on the other hand, have complained that paying with facial recognition is not so immediate, telling of problems such as the camera being too high that cannot capture the whole face or technical difficulties in completing the payment.
In China, the first experiments with the use of facial recognition to pay were seen as early as 2017, when a restaurant of the KFC chain in the city of Hangzhou introduced – together with Alipay – a facial recognition system that according to Alibaba was the first in the world. to be used to pay the bill at a store, and at launch it required you to enter your phone number. Now that the system is more widespread and perfected, it has been installed in shops, restaurants and even in subway stations: last March, in the Futian station in Shenzhen, facial recognition was started (for now in trial) to pass the turnstiles, which can be used after registering one's biometric data and connecting the bank account to that of the metro pass.
Alipay and WeChat have not yet disclosed how many merchants and large chain stores have installed facial recognition as a form of payment, but everything suggests that it is a rapidly expanding technology in the country, also because in China it was already used for purposes other than those. commercial: the country has in fact for some time been developing an extensive surveillance network based on citizens' biometric data. In some areas, such as the Xinjiang region, tens of thousands of cameras have been installed to store large amounts of data and make the system as accurate and detailed as possible. In large cities, this surveillance system is used, among other things, to identify those who violate the highway code.
