Are You Prepared to Pay with Your Face++?

If you have a Facebook account, then you are probably familiar with Facebook’s face detection software. When you post a photograph on Facebook, the site promptly detects faces in the picture and suggests who the person may be. However, Facebook is only one of many companies using facial recognition software. Several other companies are also in the race to roll out their facial recognition software including large household names such as Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon to name a few.

In China, people are already using facial detection software from a startup called Face++, a company valued at approximately 1 billion dollars, to make payments, access facilities and even track down criminals. The software uses several images, taken from different angles of a person’s face to get 106 high-precision face location rectangles, which can then be stored and analyzed.

Unlike many of its competitors, this software can create advanced effects such as 3D animated models and face stickers as well as analyze face related attributes such as ethnicity, age, gender, emotion, head pose, eye status, face image quality and blurriness. It is also able to find similar faces based on a collection of other faces and compare the similarity of faces with confidence scores and thresholds to evaluate the similarity. One of China’s top universities has installed this software in a female dorm to identify residents and nonresidents. At another university in China, one professor is using the technology to detect the level of boredom among his students in the class.

Face++ is also quickly expanding in China for surveillance purposes. The Chinese Government is capitalizing on this software by identifying suspected criminals with video surveillance cameras. Notably, they are using the software in some public areas to limit the amount of toilet paper that one can take to stop the widespread theft of toilet paper.  

Alipay, a mobile payments system, Didi, a ride-hauling company and Baidu, a popular search engine have already integrated Face++ into their products and services. Alipay’s “smile to pay” service launched at KFC headquarters in China earlier this year. The serv

With this technology, you won’t need to worry about ever forgetting your wallet at home again. You can use your face to pay for everything! However, facial recognition software does beg the question of privacy. This software takes pictures of people’s faces, stores the images and uses it for analysis as well as other services. In some instances, faces are being stored, and the images are attached to personal credit and debit information. If this is the new norm for payment, how can customers decide who can save the pictures and information and who can’t? Does the convenience of this product outweigh the potential privacy breach? Are you prepared to pay with your face?