I just recently saw some paper discussing possible methods for determining if an eye was still part of a living body or not, for an eye-scanner. I don’t know if we should be heartened that they’re thinking about this before someone gets their eye plucked out, or horrified that they haven’t already implemented such systems to prevent such a thing…
They did say that it wouldn’t be necessary to put one’s hand on a scanner with this system. Which is what made me wonder how accurate it could be, as that would mean that the very shape of the hand, when simply held up to the camera, wouldn’t be consistent.
An interesting method of excluding dark-skinned customers from shopping at your store by making it impossible for them to use your payment system…
False negatives would also be very bad for a payment system. If even some small percent of your customers waste time waving their hand around and getting rejected, and then having to pull out a credit card (or, worse, being forced to leave with no groceries at all), the system doesn’t last long.
Up until fairly recently, my mother always paid by check when she bought something at a store. Every so often, the check-scanning system would have a fit that would take extra time to resolve. She finally got annoyed enough to use her chipped credit card (for the first time), and once she realized how easy that was, she never went back. If one is starting out using easy payment systems, the hand-scanning system has to be flawless to compete.
Presumably there’s enough sub-surface elements being detected that it wouldn’t work. At least, not easily… (but it’s certainly possible to print out a facsimile set of veins or bones in a fake hand)
