(Fwd) British Study Claims That Photo Credit Cards Don't Work

Steve Reid steve at edmweb.com
Tue Apr 9 07:03:36 PDT 1996


> Is my credit card going to have my face digitized and encoded onto the mag
> stipe for comparision with a video camera image at the time of sale? 

I think we all know how stupid that would be... Way too easy for someone 
to put their own face on a card. For it to be effective, there would have 
to be some central Big Brotherly computer with all the faces stored 
there. Mind you, from that British study, it seems that fudging the face 
isn't really necessary. :-/

I recall, some months ago there were plans to have a fingerprinting system
at the Canada/US border and people could get accross faster if they had a
card with their fingerprint stored on it. Even the news media was able to
figure out how easy it would be to fudge it. The main idea of having the
fingerprints on the card, though, was to avoid that Big Brotherly 
computer. I don't know whatever happened to that plan.

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