Dive Brief:

• MasterCard is testing a way to validate smartphone purchases via a scan of a shopper’s face.

• It is an opt-in process that requires a user to blink so that hackers can’t simply substitute a stolen image.

• The MasterCard face-scan option could become more widely available sometime this fall.

Dive Insight:

This test moves biometrics past the fingerprint. Alibaba founder Jack Ma earlier this year also demonstrated face-recognition authentication using the company’s mobile Alipay system.

Fingerprint and facial recognition technology seem like promising avenues to authentication because they employ peoples' unique characteristics without the fuss of easily lost unique passwords or other methods that are clumsy, time-consuming, or hackable.

But privacy advocates don’t like the idea of companies using faces. They warn that, without proper privacy protections in place, the Internet of Things could become the “Loophole of Things” that eventually might allow companies or government to run amok with access to our data, as advocate Alvaro M. Bedoya put it.

One cybersecurity expert actually questioned the value of facial recognition for MasterCard. Indeed, ordinary people have proven to be resistant to face-recognition programs; it seems that people don’t like companies to be so tightly linked to them.

"From a privacy aspect it's awful, but from a business perspective, I don't understand why they'd accept that risk,” cybersecurity consulting firm co-founder Robert M. Lee told CNN Money.

That might change, considering that younger people are accustomed to splashing images of all kinds, including of themselves, all over the web — though they also seem to value some control over that.

MasterCard's move is another effort to find a secure payment system that might be safe and convenient enough to replace the “top of wallet” plastic card, which still wins, despite its precarious security, thanks to its convenience.