Ready to complete your Amazon purchase? Grab your selfie stick.
The e-commerce company is hoping to one day offer customers a safer way to pay for purchases using selfies to verify identity.
Amazon filed for a patent on Oct. 19, 2015 (published on March 10, 2016) that, if granted, would give it exclusive rights to technology that allows customers to use a selfie as a password.
In the patent's background, Amazon Technologies, Inc. stated the reasons this new technology might provide a safer online-transaction process.
"While many conventional approaches rely on password entry for user authentication, these passwords can be stolen or discovered by other persons who can impersonate the user for any of a variety of tasks," the company wrote in its application.
However, Amazon explained that selfie passwords might not be entirely foolproof, since someone might take a picture of a picture: "The resulting two-dimensional image can look substantially the same whether taken of the user or a picture of the user."
Amazon hopes to add a second step to its selfie-password process by requesting that users take an additional photo to prove they are a "living, physical being in the field of view of a camera of a computing device." This could mean showing some kind of action in a photo, like blinking, to prove you're not taking a picture of a picture. Amazon has already created an algorithm to detect such motion.
Interestingly, one of the reasons the company is filing for the patent in the first place has to do with creating a more user-friendly experience. Claiming that long passwords are hard to remember, tedious to enter, and unsafe if stored or remembered by a device, Amazon aims to offer its customers an easier to pay.
It's unclear how taking a selfie and then taking another selfie to prove you're alive would achieve that. Still, it sounds like a step forward in cybersecurity.
In 2014, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Amazon a patent for taking pictures against a "seamless white background." At the time, many tech publications scratched their heads over the request, but now that the company is filing for additional selfie-related patents, it makes more sense. Although Amazon has not clarified whether the two patents are related, the "seamless white background" could be part of the solution to weed out fake selfies.
Amazon did not immediately respond to NTRSCTN's request for comment.
