LG Pay May Be Using Selfies Somehow

For a mobile payment tool that was supposed to be dead a few months back, LG Pay has been surprisingly active since its resurrection.

A new report suggests that LG Pay could be incorporating a familiar though not often seen in the field technology involving facial recognition, based on word about the LG G6 phone.

The question, of course, is just how the facial recognition will be used, if it actually ends up used at all. With facial recognition, users could lock and unlock a phone—a necessary security mechanism though not strictly requiring facial recognition to work—or gain access to a mobile payments application to begin with.

From there, it’s possible that it could grow into allowing people to pay with their faces, so to speak, by using facial recognition as a second factor authentication tool.

If it did go that far, reports note, that would make LG Pay the first such payments platform to engage in such behavior, which would be quite a twist in its own right.

The exact nature of this development, though, will likely stay mum for some time; attempts to ask LG proper about this haven’t gone through, and LG Pay isn’t confirmed for release until the third quarter of this year. Thus, the LG G6 may not even get facial recognition much before June, and there won’t be much way to tell how it integrates with LG Pay, if at all, much before then.

This could be a flash in the pan or a really impressive advance; facial recognition might be one of the best security measures around, especially since, in recent years, it’s advanced to the point where it’s not possible to fool it with a picture or with someone’s twin brother.

Good news for those who use it, and especially so for those who want good quality protection on a mobile payment system, which is just about everybody.

Security is a vital function of any mobile payment system, and LG Pay is no different. While it may not be drawing on facial recognition so much as the device it’s on will be, it may be one of the first such payment apps to do so, making it a potential contender in the field.