Toronto-based Foodymart supermarket to use facial recognition payment system

A Toronto-based Chinese grocery store chain wants to use a facial recognition payment system to make the checkout process a bit quicker. Foodymart, which has six locations in Toronto and two in British Columbia, plans to buy facial recognition machines from SnapPay with hopes of having the system in one of its stores by early 2020. SnapPay is another Toronto-based business specializing in bringing international payment methods like AliPay and WeChat Pay to Canadian retailers.

SnapPay launched this facial recognition technology earlier this month. They want to lessen the time you need to pay for goods. The system will take a photo of your face when you're about to pay for your items. What you need to do beforehand is submit a three-dimensional scan of your face and link this to your payment account. 

The technology was developed in Canada with some of the hardware coming from China, where facial recognition systems are more commonplace.

According to both companies, the purchase agreement is still being finalized. But the plan is to deliver the system to Foodymart in the first quarter of next year.

Concerns about the potential for misuse have been raised. A possible security breach here can give unsavoury characters access to highly sensitive personal information.

Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association specializing in privacy and security, raised her concerns about the lack of the infrastructure to protect people whose biometric data could be stolen.

"Your face is not the same as your debit card number or your credit card number," she said. "It cannot be replaced, and we don't currently have systems to monitor fraudulent uses of our biometrics."

"We need to have rules in place and standards around security and implementation of this technology," McPhail said. "And we fundamentally need to have the sort of public conversations about what is and isn't acceptable when it comes to this kind of information that is so deeply sensitive."

SnapPay assured in a statement that the company would treat facial recognition data with "heightened data security requirements."

We are subject to very high levels of regulatory compliance and have extremely rigorous data security policies in place. We leverage third-party audits to make sure we continue to meet escalated data security standards," the company said.

"Our core operating principle is to operate with and provide our customers with the highest level of data security possible and will not release a solution in-market without appropriate data security in place."

Source: Yahoo! Finance