Pay for Your Amazon Order by Taking a Selfie

Passwords? That’s so, well, still this year, but we’ve got so many other options for authenticating our identity these days. You might be pressing your thumb against a fingerprint reader on one of these fancy new smartphones, but who has time for that? The company that made it possible for you to bypass the online shopping cart altogether with one-click buying buttons is reportedly filing a patent that will let you take a selfie to pay for your Amazon order.

Instead of having to enter your password on your smartphone or tablet, you can simply complete your purchase by taking a still photo or possibly a video of yourself to authenticate your identity and to pay for your purchase using one of the payment methods you have on file. The idea, as you can imagine, is to streamline the buying process and make it easier for you to buy way more things on Amazon without giving it a second though.

If using a selfie to verify your identity sounds familiar, it should. Face Unlock was a feature included in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The problem is that people figured out that holding up a picture of the user was oftentimes good enough, making it far from secure.

The Amazon patent, on the other hand, takes things a little further. It effectively combines a selfie with a live captcha, sort of, because it could instruct the user to blink his left eye or smile or tilt her head to the right. I’m not sure if going through one of these “video selfies” is really any faster than typing in your Amazon password. It could be easier to remember though, since you can’t really forget your face.

Via Recode