Cash, Charge or Fingerprint?

Biometric technology makers say the biggest advantage their systems can offer is speed at the checkout counter. Executives of Pay by Touch say a transaction on their system can be completed in about 14 seconds, compared with 64 seconds to process a check and 48 seconds for a credit card.

"We're all always convinced we've gotten in the long line. . . . Any way we can improve that experience, make it quicker, make it more secure, we're interested in doing that," said Michael Sansolo, senior vice president of the Food Marketing Institute, an industry trade group.

Robinson, of BioPay, said the real motivation for retailers will be financial. Credit card companies often charge retailers a fee equal to almost 2 percent of the total purchase price for each credit transaction. So for every $30 tank of gas bought with a credit card at the Sterling BP, the store pays a fee of 60 cents or more. But BioPay charges the store a flat 15-cent fee for each transaction, regardless of the size of the purchase.

"What they're offering is a bit of relief from the transaction fees," said Gray Taylor, vice president of research at the National Association of Convenience Stores.

In 2004, the biometric payment market -- which includes paycheck verification fees -- totaled $33.8 million, according to the International Biometric Group. That's just a sliver of the overall biometric market, which is dominated by security technologies and totaled $1.2 billion in 2004, but the payment market is expected to grow, according to the group.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy rights group, is concerned about that trend. He worries that the technology could be compromised, exposing huge databanks of personal information. Systems can always break, he says, either because of malicious or accidental causes, but the information stored by biometric companies is in some ways far more valuable than that held by credit card firms.

"You can always get a new Social Security number, but you certainly can't get a new thumbprint. . . . If things mess up, I could be hurt much more badly by a mistake," Lee said. And week after week, headlines scream of data breaches putting thousands of individuals at greater risk of identity theft, a crime that can ruin personal credit and take months or years to clear up.

Robinson, of BioPay, argues that a personal check written at a grocery store passes through eight people before it is cashed, a process he considers much less secure than a biometric payment, in which the fingerprint image is connected immediately to the user's bank account.

"What can I do to hurt you if I have a picture of the tip of your finger? Not much," Robinson said, contending that associating fingerprints with legal troubles is unwarranted. BioPay does not share its biometric data with government agencies, and in fact, the full fingerprints are not stored in the system. Instead, a complex mathematical algorithm is created to represent identifying characteristics of the fingerprint, which are matched to the real thing when a user shows up at a checkout counter.

The technology has taken off slowly at the Sterling convenience store. Since it was installed in late 2003, about 300 people have enrolled at that store and two others in Leesburg owned by Gladu. Except for a couple of small BioPay stickers on the doors of the shop and an occasional ad interrupting the easy-listening music pumped into the store, Gladu isn't really pushing the technology. He's convinced biometrics will take off eventually, but for now it's mostly a novelty, Gladu says, something to set him apart from the other gas stations in town.

"It's like when you watch TV and they put their hand on the screen to open the sliding door. This is kind of the same thing -- it's science fiction come to reality," Gladu said.