Cameras on payment terminals

Privacy Questions
1

Hi all, this is my first post on this forum. Feel free to close if this has been covered elsewhere.

Recently I have noticed there are front-facing cameras on payment terminals almost everywhere I go. I live in Europe. See an example in the photo below, taken in Norway.

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Q: What is the point of this? Scanning barcodes?

This article describes the cameras and basically concludes “there are no use for cameras yet but perhaps there will be in the future”.

Q: Is it reasonable to worry about the payment processor taking photos/filming customers? My paranoid brain would appreciate some facts and perspectives from more knowledgeable people here.

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2

I also once looked into this, they are very common in the UK. From what I found on manufacturers’ websites it us indeed intended for QR codes, but also endless possibilities. Given most of those POS terminals all run (outdated versions of) Android there isn’t anything stopping them to use it to snap a picture or video of you really. Although I doubt that that happens a lot, I have not found offerings of it. But surely it is not impossible.

3

You can wear the blue medical masks and your are less identifiable. If people ask, you can say its for health reasons and you can spout out that we didnt learn any lesson from COVID-19.

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Laughed out loud at this.

5

Thanks. I just don’t really see the point. So they want to look up my nose when I pay? What extra information does that give them? They already know the identity of the buyer through the card holder.

But I have been around too long to know that most companies are not willing to pay for nice-to-have features without specific utility. But these cameras are literally on every single POS terminal I see. So either there is some value that they are willing to pay for to include the camera, or the terminal provider throws them in for free because there’s value for them.
Or I’m just paranoid, could very well be.

6

Welcome.

Why didn’t they call it a card reader? That word is more suitable.

When it comes to personal funds, it is crucial to be transparent and upfront. Transaction controlling parties have the right to ensure that in any situation where your money is spent, they have opportunity to realize that it is you or a living person.

As you leave the store, three cameras are watching you. Before you reached the cashier, several more were monitoring your every move. And there will be more on your way home.

But only the camera on this device with buttons saw you at the moment of payment.

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Have you done any machine learning? One of the biggest challenges of supervised machine learning is to actually label the data accurately. Most of the time, it’s not feasible because it’d be too expensive and labour intensive.

When you can link images of people to their actual identity with near perfect accuracy (which is the case here), you have a perfectly labelled data off of which you can train machine learning models. This is invaluable to companies.

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Thatn whats the whole point of ML than?

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Im talking about labelling the training data, as I’m talking about supervised learning.

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You laugh but as a healthcare adjacent worker, I ALWAYS use this to my advantage. :rofl:

I appreciate a bit that mask wearing, especially the blue one, is an ok practice/acceptable on my locale.

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I don’t think it’s paranoid to worry about this. It’s very unnerving to know that you are being watched and recorded all the time.

Of course the excuse is that it prevents fraud and criminals from using a stolen card or accessing an account, but PIN codes, passwords and 2FA can provide extremely good security without the privacy violation and the future security risks (facial-prints and other personal data being leaked or stolen and then abused).

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Thanks for replies all. I find the ML training use case to make sense to justify the cost.

Just another privacy invasion noted without any possibility to really do anything about it. I’ve been thinking, cameras are becoming smaller and smaller, in the future it will not be possible to know if there are cameras present. In the door handles, bathroom ventilation, lamps or lighting control, wardrobes, smoke detector… Some company will justify putting a camera or mic in their product and you won’t even know about it.

I just moved into a new house and I think about this a lot. Haven’t found any strange looking smoke detectors or lamps so far :slightly_smiling_face:

13

Let’s look up the product, as this would be one of the first things that professionals such as Deviant Ollam or Andrew “bunnie” Huang would do.

As alluded to in earlier posts, this is the “Lane 5000 LE” from Ingenico. Close to the bottom of the page for this product, it states:

All payment methods accepted including QR code payment thanks to an optional camera

This is also mentioned in the consumer-facing product datasheet.

Not every picture of the device shows the camera, since it’s optional. Since the camera seems to be part of the chassis, the camera option needs to be specified when ordering and it is not possible to put the camera on afterwards.

I’m not sure what the “LE” suffix means, but this device looks the same and basically looks the same to any customer in a store and is practically the same as the “Lane 5000”, as the links below refer to this model number. There is still an online resource page for this model.

Page 9 of the user guide indicates that this is a 0.5 megapixel/VGA-resolution camera (i.e., 640x480) and page 24 shows what the device looks like with the camera option. A rather low camera resolution by today’s flagship camera standards, but apparently this is sufficient for QR code scanning.

(From a UX perspective, it’s a bit awkward to turn a smartphone’s screen away from the user to scan a QR code compared to laser readers that work fine on smartphone screens; but that’s an aside.)

Quickly:

  • The datasheet shows a picture with the camera.
  • Other verisions of the datasheet (see: 1, 2, and 3) all mention the camera option.
    • Links 2 and 3 have the first picture show the with the camera.

The OS is “Telium TETRA”. Making very broad guesses on this “black box” without being able to open up to look at the PCB inside, I would infer that if there were any camera surveillance capabilities, then the device could not be able to do too much on-device and would have to offload it to a server destination to do anything practically useful (i.e., such as saving the video).

From the company’s perspective and since the camera is simply an option, this is probably not a good use of resources to try to coincidentally engineer security video features into this device, as the OS would be installed across both camera and non-camera models. Also given the fact that it supports up to a 32 GB microSD card and it has a Cortex-A7 chip, which is the same one that the Raspberry Pi 2 had at its release in 2015, this point-of-sale (POS) device hypothetically could have RPi2-like capabilities.

Based on this, for saving picture stills whenever the POS device is being used and/or when there is a payment transaction and saved on-device, this seems somewhat relatively feasible with this high level description of the hardware. However, for video capabilities that would be a continuous stream/recording for security video purposes, you might be pushing your luck for video that’s at 480p, or at least not saving a lot of video at 480p. I had a professor who used a RPi2 to save stills and to report live snow levels in the woods, and although I don’t remember the resolution of the first RPi camera, I think that’d be a much better DIY camera than what’s on the LANE 5000.

I’m not really a hardware expert, but as @HauntSanctuary mentioned, you can always wear a mask if you know of stores that use Lane 5000 devices with cameras while checking out.

14

With digital payments becoming popular, I see these payment terminals with front-facing cameras are becoming more common.

If the camera is meant for QR scanning, why does it point towards the payer’s face and not (for example) downwards?

It’s an impractical task to track which shops use which payment terminals to determine what the cameras do, and those devices could be hardware hacked by the owner. Like @HauntSanctuary suggested I suggest wear a mask (unless it’s illegal or culturally unacceptable where you live) and avoid the stare of those cameras.