How secure are fingerprint transactions?

SINGAPORE — Consumers can now use biometric technology to make payments for online purchases using their fingerprints, but is it secure?

Smartphone users can now make payments with just their fingerprints, which means they can say goodbye to passwords, by swiping their thumbs against their smartphones to make payment for the items they buy online.

Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is the first device in Singapore to support this function, and it is only for PayPal users.

PayPal is looking at bringing biometric transactions to other devices with fingerprint authentication technology.

Consumers can therefore choose between using their fingerprints or passwords to complete online transactions.

Mr Lawrence Chan, Southeast Asia and India general manager at PayPal, said: “Your financial information is with PayPal. We look after your financial information. Your financial information doesn’t sit on the device. So if for any reason you should lose your device, your financial information is still very safe.”

Still, cyber security expert Lam Kwok Yan thinks consumers should take precautions, even if biometric authentication is generally regarded as more secure than using passwords.

“Biometric (information) is something that the user cannot change,” said Prof Lam. “I mean, you can change password if you feel uncomfortable but you can’t change your finger.

“The other thing is, during the registration phase, biometric data is stored in the mobile device ... Nowadays people like to change phones quite often. So when they change phones, they need to make sure they erase those biometric data before they dispose (of) the phone.”

Hotel-booking site Agoda, online supermarket RedMart and some e-commerce sites affiliated with SingPost are just a few places where consumers can pay biometrically through PayPal.

Other e-commerce sites like Amazon and Taobao offer the usual means of credit card payments.

PayPal predicts that Singapore’s online commerce market will grow from S$3.3 billion to S$4.4 billion from 2014 to 2015. CHANNEL NEWSASIA