“Palm Wallet” Vein Reading Biometric Payment System Unveiled At CES 2014

We covered some of the wacky technologies that debuted at the 2014 international CES (consumer electronics show), in Las Vegas. Including the “smart” wifi toothbrush. Unfortunately not all of the technology is so wacky, in fact some of it is quite disturbing!

The most disturbing in my opinion is something called Pulse Wallet.

Main stream news outlets are reporting on the technology with terms such as: “Ever had that awkward moment where you go to pay for something and you left your card at home? A new cardless payment service could end those troubling days.”

theverge.com is reporting:

PulseWallet CTO Matt Saricicek remembers watching Google debut its Wallet mobile payments product and being pretty disappointed. “Why should you have to present anything to make a payment — and to prove your identity — other than yourself?” he wondered. Saricicek looked at the iPad POS systems he was building for San Francisco company Revel Systems and decided he didn’t love those either. He booked a flight home to New Jersey and pitched an idea to high school pal Aimann Rasheed: what if you could pay with your finger?

Several months later at CES 2012, the duo debuted a payments system built on Hitachi’s VeinID technology, which takes an infrared photo of the veins in one of your fingers. But nobody wanted to put their hands in the machine, and VeinID wasn’t as accurate as Saricicek and Rasheed had hoped. So they dreamt bigger. The duo looked next to Fujitsu, whose PalmSecure technology operated on similar principles but scanned your palm instead of your finger. The infrared image generated by PalmSecure was converted into a biometric template, which was then stored in the cloud. When you place your hand over another PalmSecure reader operated by the same owner (like a bank, hospital, or school), the device looks for a perfect match in its database, and if it finds one, your identity is verified. After age eight, Saricicek says, most peoples’ veins stay largely the same, so you won’t have to worry about rescanning your hand. The technology is correct about 99.99992 percent of the time, Fujitsu says, and since PulseWallet requires you to enter your phone number as a second degree of authentication, it hopes to raise that percentage to 100.
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Here is what the main stream is leaving out.

As highlighted in theverge.com article. Palm wallet biometric information and transaction information will be stored in “the cloud”. The very same cloud that agencies like the NSA have been spying on.

“Companies can no longer discount the risk of losing control of confidential corporate data in the cloud. Government data mining is here to stay, in one invasive form or another.

The latest round of stunning revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance and data mining of cloud-based services and Internet communications has added a new term to our lexicon of government spying. In addition to Prism, we now have Muscular looming over cloud adoption.

The Muscular revelations are eye opening because, according to The Washington Post, they point to a far wider scope and far more indiscriminate data capture than even the Prism revelations suggest. “
Source: informationweek.com

Giving government agencies the ability to data mine my biometric and transaction information, just to save a few seconds at the cash register. No thanks!

This technology makes the idea of a bar coded human being frighteningly real.