Privacy advocates have long had reservations about biometric facial scanning, but some businesses still haven’t gotten the memo – with grocery chains now reneging on promises to avoid biometrics and a major EFTPOS supplier spruiking a terminal that lets you pay by scanning your face. Verifone, which has over 300,000 EFTPOS terminals in everyday use, this month introduced Australian customers to its Victa model, which embraces biometric scanning alongside normal tap and pay features. Customers enrol their biometrics once through merchants, digital wallets, banks, and other companies, with the technology creating a unique digital token that cannot be used elsewhere or reverse engineered to recreate the original face or handprint. By looking into a camera on the device, or scanning their palms to capture the unique pattern of veins in their hands, customers verify their identity against the token data, completing financial transactions or identifying themselves as a member of the store’s loyalty program. It’s part of a suite of products that let merchants sell with back-end integration to e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Bilt, Aevi, PayPal, and Stripe – and the ability to, as Verifone head of strategic partners Kristy Gregory put it, “pay with a smile.” “People already use biometrics to unlock phones, access apps, and confirm payments online,” she said. Verifone is “giving customers that same choice at the point of sale” with a tool that makes checkout “faster, easier and safer for consumers and retailers,” she added. A hard sell for privacy-focused consumers? Retailers may love the cachet of offering biometric capabilities for consumers, but those customers have consistently proven more wary of other technologies built around biometrics. Biometric systems “are becoming more effective as technology advances [but] they are not a foolproof method of authentication or identification” as spoofing, false acceptance, and other issues persist, the