Love Selfies? Now They Can Keep Your Credit Card Safe
MasterCard is appealing to America’s obsession with selfies in an effort to reduce credit card identity theft.
The credit card company is launching a new program that will allow consumers to approve online purchases with a facial scan. At the checkout page, you’ll be asked to take a picture of yourself using your phone instead of entering a password.
Currently, customers can stop hackers from using their credit card on the Web by setting up a “SecureCode,” which requires a password when shopping online. The password system was used in 3 billion transactions last year.
This fall MasterCard will launch a small pilot program involving 500 customers using fingerprints and facial scans. If the test is a success, the company plans on rolling it out publicly afterward. The company is also looking ahead to one day apply voice recognition technology.
To use the new selfie system, customers need to download the MasterCard phone app. Once you pay for something, a pop-up will appear asking for your authorization with either a fingerprint or facial recognition. Using facial recognition, customers stare at the phone, blink once — and bam! All done. The blink is a security measure so thieves can’t just hold up a photo of you. A fingerprint only requires a touch.
Passwords are easily forgotten, stolen or cracked, so the new system is a way to prove your identity using biometrics. Critics of the new system are uncomfortable that the photo or fingerprint a customer puts into his or her phone will transmit to the company’s computer servers. Cybersecurity experts worry the transfer of such information across devices is too big of a privacy risk.
MasterCard wasn’t the first company to develop a facial recognition app — Chinese shopping brand Alibaba demonstrated one in March, but had to postpone the technology’s launch because of security risks found by China’s central bank and police ministry.
Chart of the Day: Boosting Corporate Tax Revenues
The leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all proposed increasing taxes on corporations, including raising income tax rates to levels ranging from 25% to 35%, up from the current 21% imposed by the Republican tax cuts in 2017. With Bernie Sanders leading the way at $3.9 trillion, here’s how much revenue the higher proposed corporate taxes, along with additional proposed surtaxes and reduced tax breaks, would generate over a decade, according to calculations by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, highlighted Wednesday by Bloomberg News.
Chart of the Day: Discretionary Spending Droops
The federal government’s total non-defense discretionary spending – which covers everything from education and national parks to veterans’ medical care and low-income housing assistance – equals 3.2% of GDP in 2020, near historic lows going back to 1962, according to an analysis this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Chart of the Week: Trump Adds $4.7 Trillion in Debt
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated this week that President Trump has now signed legislation that will add a total of $4.7 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2029. Tax cuts and spending increases account for similar portions of the projected increase, though if the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Republican overhaul are extended beyond their current expiration date at the end of 2025, they would add another $1 trillion in debt through 2029.
Chart of the Day: The Long Decline in Interest Rates
Are interest rates destined to move higher, increasing the cost of private and public debt? While many experts believe that higher rates are all but inevitable, historian Paul Schmelzing argues that today’s low-interest environment is consistent with a long-term trend stretching back 600 years.
The chart “shows a clear historical downtrend, with rates falling about 1% every 60 years to near zero today,” says Bloomberg’s Aaron Brown. “Rates do tend to revert to a mean, but that mean seems to be declining.”
Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared
Lawmakers are considering three separate bills that are intended to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Here’s an overview of the proposals, from a series of charts produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. An interesting detail highlighted in another chart: 88% of voters – including 92% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans – want to give the government the power to negotiate prices with drug companies.
