Just give them the finger
July 18th, 2005
Those of you who interpreted the headline in a way it was not meant to be interpreted, shame on you. An ‘Edeka’ store in the German town of Ruelzheim has introduced a paying system by which a customer needs to place his/her finger on a scanner in order to pay for their merchandise. All the customers need to register at first by sampling their finger print and giving their bank or credit card details. The shopping chain is confident that the system will be successful as the chance of two people having the same fingerprint is about one in 220 million. Looks like the whole world is going biometric.
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It sounds all fun and exciting with the newness… but I’m telling you… storing my finger prints or biometric information in some database scares the crap out of me.
Is there really a new to be so lazy as to not carry cash, or a debit/credit card? I get the identity theft thing, but I think a lot of that is just hype to help market these biometric systems.
Wow! First of all, I love what you’ve done with your site
The layout really works out well and I like the fact that you added both of your blogs 
I’ll be updating the link to your site on my blog!
As for the fingerprint method they’re using as payment - I’m not sure I would do it myself. I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but the idea of them storing my fingerprints is frightening…
Thank you Nicole
I actually know a fair bit about Bio-Metrics (Part of my day job is to do with security stuff) and I would say they are probably using one of the Bio-Metric systems that uses an algorithm based system which doesn’t actually store a copy of your fingerprint but instead uses a mathematical equation based on finger topography.
Basically it takes points from your finger, translates them into mathematical figures and then uses an algorithm to come up with an answer. Everyones finger results in a different answer but is always the same answer for the same person. (I never really was good at explaining these things but I hope you get the idea)
That was pretty well explained. Thanks. I think its a little similar to vector images where the file only contains the points mapping the image and the algorithms concerning the points. This makes the file size much smaller and the images much much clearer and they do not lose quality when we play around with it.