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Comment by mmm_grayons | Hacker News Reader

Or we could (radical idea here) not use biometrics. I don't mean to be dismissive, but what advantage does this provide over opening a web site and hitting "pay" or maybe some sort of NFC tap? This looks like biometrics for the sake of being cool and flashy, which is not a trade-off I'm willing to make.

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Here's an example which something like Amazon One can solve, but a card cannot:

When I go to the grocery shop and I buy alcohol then I have to wait at the self checkout till until a member of staff comes to verify my age before I can pay for my shopping basket. That involves me showing them an ID (e.g. my driving license) and them having to verify my biometric (face) by looking at me and then looking at my driving license. This is time consuming and requires additional staff at self checkout tills, making them less "self checkouty".

On the other hand (or palm should I say :P) I could age verify myself only once at an Amazon One kiosk and then have my legal age linked to my verified palm. Now I can go and buy alcohol and when I present my palm then the checkout till knows that it's me (because unlike a driving license or credit card or phone I can't hand my palm to someone else). It knows that I'm of legal age to buy alcohol and therefore was able to do three things in one go: age verify, pay and reward points all via a single hand gesture. That is a win for the consumer and the shop as they don't need that extra staff anymore and there's less of a human bottle neck, leading to faster checkouts.

> I could age verify myself only once at an Amazon One kiosk and then have my legal age linked to my verified palm

Why not do the same thing, but instead of verifying your palm you verify a device that's responsible for authenticating you? This could be a special phone app (like Singapore's SingPass[1]) or even a small card with a built-in fingerprint reader. Once you authenticate yourself to the device, it can attest to your identity and the transaction can be finished via NFC.

Seems like the best of both worlds - automate identity validation without a centralized biometric database.

1. https://www.singpass.gov.sg

> Why not do the same thing, but instead of verifying your palm you verify a device?

Because my (imaginary) 12 year old son can grab my phone and then pretend to be an adult when doing booze shopping. This is the reason why most Western countries don't allow this kind of technology for age verification. For example in the UK you have to file an application if your new technology can be authorised to be used for age verification in pubs, restaurants and other venues and that wouldn't pass their requirements.

On the other hand, a palm cannot be given to a 12 year old person. If Amazon One uses an element of palm veins in their biometric template, then even if you chopped off your hand it wouldn't work anymore because the blood flow would stop and therefore fail the identification.

It is true that an adult could still pay for booze for a 12 year old by presenting their palm, but that is already the case today where parents can go shopping with their children and buy alcohol as part of the family basket.

EDIT:

At the end of the day, a biometric will ensure that the adult is actually physically present at the time of purchase, which is what the law requires for things like alcohol shopping. Devices don't have that extra layer of quality assurance.

EDIT 2:

> But why couldn't the device handle your biometric authentication? Your 12-year-old son can't (hopefully) steal your face or your fingerprint

Because what happens on the device is unknown to the thing which needs to know that you are of legal age. At the end of the day it's just a phone which says "yes person is above 18" but how do you know that my phone didn't just reply that because it was programmed by me to do so? If the biometric is verified by the Amazon One device which is not my personal device then it's infinitely less likely to have bene tampered with.

But why couldn't the device handle your biometric authentication? Your 12-year-old son can't (hopefully) steal your face or your fingerprint.

You might be able to avoid a central database of biometric data, but who is going to certify the accuracy of these biometric authentication devices?

Presumably if a manufacturer made a device that didn't actually bother checking the fingerprint, the systems that integrate with these devices would have to refuse to accept claims from it.

If this were an interoperable standard, I imagine the pool of "approved issuers" would be relatively small, limited to e.g. governments or banks. Bloomberg uses a system not entirely dissimilar to this[1], and I could see Apple and Google building an OS API that the issuers' apps would use specifically for this.

1. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/101862/what-adv...

Yup, and I could see governments demanding that these devices have "lawful interception" capability, allowing the biometric data to be scooped up with individual warrants, or in bulk with a National Security Letter, to "catch all the terrorists".

If your son is stealing your stuff to go buy booze there's a bigger issue and the answer is not invasive biometrics, nor is it government restriction of alcohol sales. Kids will drink if they want to; only a willingness not to do so will stop them.

Germany uses for e.g. cigarette dispensers (those shitty ones you see in shitty districts) two possible options: (a) ID (b) bank card + PIN, where the bank verifies you’re > 18yo.

Works just fine.

Plus all your alcohol (and other) purchases are permanently logged and associated with you. Hell yeah.

The only benefit I can think of, is that biometrics has no way of me loaning my credentials.

If my age verification was tied to my palm, I'd have to cut off my hand to let a teenager buy booze with it.

But I still don't feel this is a compelling argument.

I honestly don't care that much about kids buying booze. The "think of the children" argument also typically leads me to be suspicious of the motives of those that make it. Kids are going to drink if they want to; I didn't because I chose to do otherwise, not because I couldn't.

The justification of biometrics is usually to make it harder for fraudsters to pretend they're someone else.

However, one advantage of something external to your body is that if it ever does get compromised it is a lot easier to deprecate that thing and replace it with a new one.

In practical terms, biometrics are almost always introduced as a convenient way to authenticate, certainly not as a MORE secure method of authentication. Just look at how protestors have disabled it to avoid giving cops an easy way of accessing their phone without their consent.

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