Last week there was a story in the New York Times about Sberbank, Russia's largest retail bank, intending to roll out new ATMs that will have built-in lie detectors as a way to prevent customer credit card fraud.
According to the Times, "Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end."
The ATM will scan a person's passport, take their fingerprints as well as perform a 3-D scan of the person's face. Next, the ATM will ask a series of questions concerning the person's employment or debts, and voice-analysis software will then indicate whether the person is being truthful or not. The software is said to detect "nervousness or emotional distress" which might mean the person is "dissembling." The bank will use the information gathered, along with other information including the person's credit history, to decide whether they get a credit card.
Sberbank, which has the Russian government as its majority owner, says it will follow all applicable privacy laws.
According to the Times article, credit approval by ATM already is a "fact of financial life in Turkey."
In 2009, I blogged about the largest retail bank in South Africa, Absa, rolling out ATMs that will pepper spray a person if they try to tamper with it in some way.
I wonder how long it will take before a lie-detecting, pepper spraying ATM is deployed somewhere.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
