The system is simple: A customer signs up on their phone, takes a selfie and adds cash to their Pop Pay account from a credit card or bank account. When it comes time to pay for their meal, they look into the camera of a PopID tablet or kiosk , the cashier verifies their name, and money is withdrawn from the account.For restaurants, the service is fast and cheap, assuming customers sign up for it.
John Miller, the 42-year-old Pasadena entrepreneur who founded and runs PopID, didn't plan on wading into cutting-edge privacy issues when he quit his nanotech job 10 years ago. He just wanted to start a global cheeseburger chain. "Ten years ago, maybe five years ago, there was no way I'd ever sign up for facial recognition," said Chris Georgalas, co-owner of the Pasadena fried chicken sandwich shop Daddy's Chicken Shack. But since Apple started allowing users to unlock their iPhones using their faces in 2018, Georgalas said, the technology has become less intimidating."The people that use it, they love it, and they come back and they use it again.
But Miller's vision for a face-based network goes beyond paying for lunch or checking in to work. After users register for the service, he wants to build a world where they can"use it for everything: at work in the morning to unlock the door, at a restaurant to pay for tacos, then use it to sign in at the gym, for your ticket at the Lakers game that night, and even use it to authenticate your age to buy beers after.
That scenario was vividly illustrated in July, when the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation found that a San Francisco business association gave the San Francisco Police Department real-time access to a private network of cameras and cache of footage during the height of the Floyd protests. If police combined access to surveillance footage with access to a database like PopID's, protesters who used the payment service could be quickly identified en masse.