World View | The Mark of the Beast Is Located in Aisle Six, Adjacent to Frozen Foods

CISO Paul Raines ponders biometrics, religion and privacy in a Dutch grocery store

By Paul Raines

July 08, 2008 — I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist church in a rural southern town. I have since moved on to drastically different positions both physically and spiritually, but I was reminded of those roots during a recent visit to--of all places--a grocery store in Holland. The national grocery chain, Albert Heijn recently decided to test a new method of checking out customers. Under a pilot program called Tip2Pay, store customers can pay for their groceries at the checkout counter by simply scanning their fingerprint. (See http://www.ah.nl/albertheijn/persberichten/article.jsp?id=486644 —sorry, the press announcement is in Dutch, but there's an accompanying photo.)

As a security professional, I immediately recognised that the store was utilising biometric technology to authenticate frequent customers who had pre-registered their contact and payment details with the grocery chain and who had given their consent for the store to debit their bank account after proper authentication. From a customer service perspective it made perfect sense. I could go to the grocery store on the weekend without having to take my wallet or pocket book. That's very important to a nation that uses bicycles to travel—the less I have to carry the better.

However, remembering back to the days of fire-and-brimstone sermons in the heart of the Bible Belt, I immediately knew how this would be viewed in that community. You see, fundamentalists take what is written in the Bible literally and in the book of Revelation it is written:

"He (the Anti-Christ) also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name." Revelation 13:16-17 (NIV)

Hmmm, does a fingerprint qualify as a mark on the hand? Really doesn't matter because with the fundamentalist crowd would see it as the camel's nose-under-the-tent, the foot-in-the-door, the first step on the slippery slope to Hades and it must be nipped in the bud. Nipped, I tell you. Nipped-in-the-bud, period.

A second group opposing the introduction of fingerprint scanning are privacy advocates. They would say that fingerprints are too intrusive. If the local grocery store has your fingerprint, what are they doing with it? Are they selling it to interested third parties? Sharing it with the government? If someone has a copy of your fingerprint, does that mean that you could be framed for a crime that you didn't commit? It seems like it would be pretty easy to fabricate your fingerprints at the scene of a crime and thus make it appear that you had been there.

• Print

• Biometric Security
• Strong Authentication for Online Banking: Success Factors
• Jeffrey Rosen and the Naked Crowd: Liberty and Surveillance for All
• World View | The Frying Dutchman