MasterCard users could soon pay for groceries with their face or hand

MasterCard is piloting new technology that lets shoppers make payments with facial recognition and fingerprint scanning. 

At the checkout, users will be able to authenticate their payment by showing their face or the palm of their hand instead of swiping their card. The program has already gone live in five grocery stores in Sao Paulo in Brazil. 

To sign up on MasterCard, you take a picture of your face or scan your fingerprint to register it with an app. This is done either on your smartphone or at a payment terminal. You can then add a credit card, which gets linked to your biometric data.When you enrol, your face or fingerprint scan is replaced with a random string of alphanumeric characters, and then linked to your payment card. 

The feature could integrate with loyalty schemes and make personalized recommendations based on previous purchases, MasterCard says.

The use of biometric information for payments raises a host of concerns around privacy and how the data gets collected.

But MasterCard claims all the data customers enter into its system is encrypted in such a way that ensures their privacy isn’t compromised.

MasterCard says it plans to roll out the program globally later this year.

-CyberBeat