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Will You Be Paying for That With Cash or Selfie?

Passwords may be a pain, but are selfies even more painful?

Apple and Google may be trying to convince users to pay for things with their phones and watches — but MasterCard’s more interested in your face.

The credit and debit card company will soon be testing a mobile app that would have users pay for online goods by taking a selfie, according to CNN. The app recognizes your face, but transactions won’t go through until you blink, so that thieves can’t fool the app by just holding up a picture of you.

“Passwords are a pain,” MasterCard’s chief product security officer Ajay Bhalla told CNN. “People write it, and they get really surprised when a hacker gets into websites and knows the passwords to all their accounts.”

The report claims the app can also read one’s fingerprint via your phone’s camera, although it’s unclear how reliable or secure that would be compared to dedicated fingerprint-scanning hardware like Apple’s Touch ID. And both forms of input would be transmitted in some form over the Web, which will inevitably leave some security concerns dangling.

Or, then there’s this work-around:

https://twitter.com/thorsheim/status/616959132881584133

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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