Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Pay By Touch’s Riordan said consumer education and awareness are critical issues in accelerating consumer acceptance of the technology. Pay By Touch has its systems in place at about 300 retail locations, Riordan said, with plans for “several thousand by the end of ’06.”

“Until we have a stronger and greater presence in the marketplace, that [negative perception] will be one of the greater hurdles to overcome,” Riordan said. “The concerns are typically in areas of privacy or security.”

Riordan said she has heard the “mark of the beast” concerns and offered a comment that echoes the stance of much of the retail industry: “This is strictly a way to more safely and efficient process transactions and nothing more. Pay By Touch has nothing to do with religion.”

Fingerprinting itself suffers from bad associations, courtesy of movies and TV police shows. The perception is that people’s fingerprints are taken only when they are accused of crimes.

Pay By Touch tries to stay clear of that association by avoiding the term “fingerprint” altogether. “We don’t use that word. We talk about a ‘finger image,'” she said.

It’s not merely a question of semantics. The traditional fingerprint is created by pressing the finger onto an inkpad and then inking the copy of that fingerprint onto paper.

Pay By Touch’s system, on the other hand, scans the finger’s ridges and converts the information into a series of stored numbers. That means that, unlike in the traditional police setup, the image of the finger itself isn’t kept on file, but numbers and data points that describe the image are saved.

The result, according to Pay By Touch, is that a fingerprint can’t be recreated using data from its files. “We don’t share any of the information,” Riordan said.

Privacy activist Albrecht has been publicly questioning the security mechanisms behind the system, wondering if it would indeed be that difficult to steal a fingerprint and create a fake finger to fool the system.