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Think everyone would have an issue with this. Though its funny as Hell when the next applicant uses his right index finger in the scanner and his data comes up which is the previous applicant who just left the cubicle. I laughed so hard the black guy data came up and it was a previous applicant who was white
Black Applicant "OMG I've gone Michael!!"

I thought my Social Security Number was the number of the beast?

The fear of all this is justified right now.

The biggest issue is security of private information and who will be charged with securing your personal data and how it will be accessed by those who need it. The data being kept on a "Cloud" means that it is hackable. By someone.

Once we figured out the where, then we will start worrying about who holds the contract to develop the data base. Then who and how it is accessed. Very real issues.

 Ahtman wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
Am I thinking about number of the beast? It did come to mind, and it is one reason why Christians want to avoid chip based biometrics

In all fairness it isn't Christians that worry about this, but ill informed, stupid Christians that worry about this. It is a large group, don't lump them all together.

Actually its a mainstream concern not a Westboro Baptist lot concern.

The warning in Revelations has for a long time been mistranslated as the mark of the beast being on the right hand, not in the right hand. Subdermal chips link very reasonably to the warning, and would have an effect very similar to what the warning states, 'being unable to buy and sell' unless one accepted the 'mark of the beast'. As subdermal chips means that everyone would be tagged you don't need to be religious to see the danger in abuse of such a system. Revelations warned two thousand years ago at the time when the most advanced computer was an abacus with a set of warnings which only make sense now in the information age.

This need not be the case, one of the pints about Revelations is that many generations since it was written thought it applied to them in one way or other, it doesn't even need to be accurate either. If subdermal chips were considered for introduction the vast majority of Christians would protest it, and I don't think they would be the only ones. 'Mark of the beast' has a ring for the secular press too and as the Bible warns of consequences very similar to what human rights advocates would also be complaining about, yeah I can see it generating mainstream opposition beyond the religious divide.

so far there is only one person talking about it fitting the "mark of the beast" in this thread.

Read more carefully then, there is nobody saying it fits the 'mark of the beast' in this thread.
That is quantified as outside the category, so fingerprint ID doesn't cause any religious ruptions.

Fingerprint is not equal to subdermal chip, and theologically a fingerprint cannot be the mark of the beast as everyone has them, presumably even Jesus and the saints..

Then why bring it up?

Try reading. Its not hard.

 d-usa wrote:
Then why bring it up?

You added to it

Though no two persons print are the same, not even twins. I can see it happening but not currently. The database that store finger prints has to huge and constantly updated. Even a paper cut healed over time might throw off the read.

At first I thought someone else had complained about it being the mark of the beast, and that Orlanth was calling them out on it, so I joined in on the fun.

Then I thought that Orlanth posted that that Christians would think that and calling them out on it, so I thought that he started down that road while at the same time saying that the road is stupid. So I asked him what the point is.

Now I'm rereading everything again and I have honestly no clue how I came to either one of those conclusions. So sorry for my weird posts there...

 d-usa wrote:
so far there is only one person talking about it fitting the "mark of the beast" in this thread.

For a moment when I was posting this topic, I thought about mentioning people who may feared this (like the ones who thought credit card chips were back in the day) but I decided it was a tangent that wasn't important to the overall discussion.

 Jihadin wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Then why bring it up?

You added to it

Though no two persons print are the same, not even twins. I can see it happening but not currently. The database that store finger prints has to huge and constantly updated. Even a paper cut healed over time might throw off the read.

Hell, I hate those swipe machines for credit cards. They tend to be a pain in the ass at the worst possible moments. I only only guess at the reaction of some guy late for work in Japan trying to pay for gas, and runs into this problem with a bad finger.

I'm not sure what problem fingerprint ID for security of small cash payments is meant to solve.

In the UK we now have contactless payment which lets you touch your RFID equipped bank card, iPhone or Android phone to the card machine and make an immediate payment of up to £30 ($45 US) without any further authentication of your ID.

The main benefit of this is to save the time that tossers who can't manage to carry the £2 to pay for a coffee used to waste by having to take a card payment with chip and PIN. There's also a benefit to the retailer of handling less cash.

This seems to work fine and hasn't given rise to an increase in petty fraud, or theft, AFAIK.

If it did, then the cost of investigating cases of mis-payments under £30 would be excessive, and the system would be abandoned and easily replaced with petty cash.

Fingerprints have a number of possible problems:

1. What about people with no fingerprint? This could be you if you registered your index finger, then got a paper cut and stuck a sticking plaster on it. There will always need to be a non-fingerprint backup. How difficult is it for criminals to pt a sticking plaster on their finger and say they can't use the scanner, then use the more easily spoofed backup?

2. What is the rate of false positives and false negatives when registering and authenticating?

3. What happens if criminals manage to access the database and replace or steal your fingerprint? It's basically the same concept as replacing the photo in a photo ID (passport, etc.) to match someone else's face. The difference is that presenting photo ID is relatively rare compared to the number of small cash transactions people make every day, so they can be checked more carefully.

As a tangent, I wonder if the amount of minor tips that coffee shop staff receive has declined since contactless payment came in. I often go for a coffee or tea, which normally costs a bit under £2, and I put the loose change of 5-20p in the tip jar. This isn't going to happen when everyone is psying with a contactless card.

 Kilkrazy wrote:



As a tangent, I wonder if the amount of minor tips that coffee shop staff receive has declined since contactless payment came in. I often go for a coffee or tea, which normally costs a bit under £2, and I put the loose change of 5-20p in the tip jar. This isn't going to happen when everyone is psying with a contactless card.

Tipping is essentially killed by the cashless society, in the UK that would have less effect than say the US when employers use the existence of tips as an excuse to underpay staff, and the presence of tips as a culture means that tipping is expecte to be quasi-mandatory rather than optional.
Either way cashless society will sweep all that away, and the banks/governments that set up cashless transactions will not care.

I will hazard a guess with RFID microtransactions being commonplace this will have already had an effect on what goes into the tipping jar. Especially those uncomfortable with tipping as having not to get out your casgh at all makes avoiding tipping easier. I didn't even notice that my replacement Debit card had RFID on it until sometime after I had got it, and wasn't happy to find that I didn't even have the limited security of chip 'n' pin, which as ushered in with fanfare as secuire. RFID enabled cards must be a pickpockets wet dream.

Just go for the credit system...maybe....C-Bills.....

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I'm not sure what problem fingerprint ID for security of small cash payments is meant to solve.

To eliminate paper or plastic currency and potentially decrease crime in the way of theft of a wallet or using a credit card number that your waiter made a copy of (this happened to me).

Yes, I realize everyone is afraid of "Big Brother" and getting their thumbs chopped off. I'm just trying to answer your question.

I doubt it's really about security. It's about convenience. If paying for things is as simple as a thumb scan, then it's that much quicker and easier to make simple purchases, especially in tourism where Japan is targeting this particular initiative., Managing foreign currency you're not familiar with can be very awkward.

Its also about marketing.

Companies like to know what their potential customers have bought, we have all this gak with tailored advertising from YouTube etc.

If your finger is a purchase record then yiour purchasing patterns can be categorised and more effective spam can bombard you. Privacy rights will help up to a point, but they can be got around by the normal methods. A company doesn't need to know who fits a martketing profile, they need only tailor marketing to a category and have users fall into that category from the raw data.

Its a factor for business, but security is the main one for government, and is the reason why governments will look favourable on it.

 LordofHats wrote:
I doubt it's really about security. It's about convenience. If paying for things is as simple as a thumb scan, then it's that much quicker and easier to make simple purchases, especially in tourism where Japan is targeting this particular initiative., Managing foreign currency you're not familiar with can be very awkward.

And preventing theft (pickpocketing).

 LordofHats wrote:
I doubt it's really about security. It's about convenience. If paying for things is as simple as a thumb scan, then it's that much quicker and easier to make simple purchases, especially in tourism where Japan is targeting this particular initiative., Managing foreign currency you're not familiar with can be very awkward.

The idea behind the eventual adaptation of eye and fingerprint scanning is to have global access to everything about you. It will happen, but maybe not in my lifetime. Once the flood gate of the "convenience" aspect of it is open, all bets are off.

Yes, it's a scary potential Big Brother scenario, but it can be an immensely positive thing as well.

Speaking as an old Japan hand, most of these reasons don't ring true to me.

1. Japan is a very cash oriented society. People often pay large bills directly in cash and it's a part of the ritual gift giving at weddings and funerals.

2. Japan is also a very honest society. Petty crime like pick-pocketing and short-changing foreigners is fairly uncommon. When shop staff see your confusion with cash numbers, they will type the sum into a large electronic calculator to show it to you.

3. Japan already has wide-spread cashless payment for small amounts using PASMO and SUICA, which are their equivalents of the Oyster card used by London Transport (the Octopus system from Hong Kong.)

4. If you are a short term visiting foreigner, it won't be worth getting a fingerprint account for only one or two weeks in the country. While Immigration takes your fingerprints on entry, the process of getting a bank account is a huge PITA -- basically impossible unless you already have a permanent address in Japan like a relative, maybe. I know as I've been through it.

If you don't want to carry cash you would be better off to take traveller's cheques and convert them, buy a PASMO card and load it with cash. You can do this quickly and easily at any except the smallest railway or metro station in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Ticket machines are programmed for English (and maybe Korean and Chinese by now.)

My wife however said the Japanese love the latest gadgets and often are trying to introduce the "next big thing" even if there isn't any real need or demand for it. This could be the reasoning behind the fingerprint idea. Japanese companies do huge amounts of R&D because there are tax breaks for it.

Interesting stuff KilKrazy.

Thanks fro posting that.

The actual issue is: Your fingerprint isn't what authenticates you. It's the data that is conveyed by such. So for example, how would I pay off an online retailer with biometric info from my home scanner, if there's a risk of the credentials (ie, my biometrics) being intercepted and stolen? Or hacked out of some payment company's database?

I can get a credit card replaced if it's details get stolen.
I can't exactly get my fingerprints replaced.

 Killionaire wrote:
The actual issue is: Your fingerprint isn't what authenticates you. It's the data that is conveyed by such. So for example, how would I pay off an online retailer with biometric info from my home scanner, if there's a risk of the credentials (ie, my biometrics) being intercepted and stolen? Or hacked out of some payment company's database?

I can get a credit card replaced if it's details get stolen.
I can't exactly get my fingerprints replaced.

I would assume that you wouldn't use a fingerprint authentication for any online transactions. It would only be in physical stores.

Though I do get what you're saying about the data packets that make up your "digitized biometrics" being hacked/stolen. I would imagine that they'd use a rolling encryption algorithm similar to what other guys use, like the Samsung Pay thing.

There are two ways of doing it. One is to take a digital image of the fingerprint and compare it with the original registered image. The other is to analyse the original, to derive enough key points of identification -- unique whorls, and so on -- and digitise this as a set of coordinates. The scanner must do the same, and compare its packet of coordinates with the original. This way is more likely in an automated system, because it is far more mechanical.

Then you have the problem of where the original scan or dataset is held. It could be either in an online database, or in a biometric card to be carried by the fingerprintee. There are various drawbacks to both approaches.

Here is an interesting article on how unique fingerprints actually are. The TL/DR is that we don't know, but not nearly as much as people think. It takes careful analysis by experts to identify matches, and often results in mistakes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/why-your-fingerprints-may-not-be-unique/

Another problem is we already know a number of ways of spoofing scanners with different kind of fake or duplicated fingerprint. It would be possible to dupe someone else's print and put a copy of it on your own finger.

I don't think there's much to be gained from new physical forms of payment. Carrying a small plastic card is not that hard, so there's little new convenience to be achieved by making it a fingerprint or anything like that. The other things it is meant to help with are pretty weak, I think. Banks are fine with small payments requiring no pin code because fraud at that level is close to irrelevant. Fraud is huge, but it is done on a large scale, not with pinching credit cards and making a bunch of small purchases. I don't think we're going to see multi-billions invested in new readers just to avoid credit card theft.

I'm more interested in improving the sophistication of payments. Should it really be that hard in this day and age to handle multiple people each paying part of a restaurant bill by card? And why does it take three or four days for credit card narration to appear on my on-line account, when the adjustment to my balance is almost instantaneous?

 Orlanth wrote:
Tipping is essentially killed by the cashless society

Tipping is quite easily handled, actually. The bill comes out, you write the desired tip at the bottom and hand it back, and you are charged the total amount.