Following the launch of the ubiquitous iPhone 5s, it looks like eBay’s PayPal have been anticipating the addition of fingerprint scanners to mobile phones. PayPal have lodged a patent in the US which suggests in the future we could be using different fingers to select the payment method we’d like to pay with.
The patent says “Instead of selecting a drop down menu to view available funding sources and selecting a desired funding source, the user may simply place the finger corresponding to the desired funding source against the mobile device screen”. Of course with the new iPhone 5s users wouldn’t even have to place their finger on the screen, they could just place it over the built in fingerprint identity sensor.
The big question of course is how would you remember which funding source was associated with which finger on which hand? Would you set the card with the lowest credit limit as your pinkie, or is there a better way to remember which card goes with which fingerprint?
2 Responses
Finally, we can give Paypal the finger.
Maybe payment providers will start sending out branded thimbles to easily label your pinkies 🙂