Obviously, there’s much more to the story of palm-print recognition than this preview. Since the content of videos is less search-friendly than texts, they are harder to sort through, but they also often pack more information into just a few seconds. Yet Chinese video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou-which are replacing traditional sites like Weibo to become the place where people express themselves and document their lives-can provide more insight than ever. This reporting experience reaffirms an idea I’ve had for a long time: It’s hard to know what’s happening in China from the outside, both because of the powerful censorship machine and because of the border policies that make visiting China difficult. (Lol, this clearly didn’t stop people from taking photos. Please don’t tell external people.” In one photo posted online, a written warning states that photography of the device is prohibited. No matter their exact use, the devices are likely still in the trial phase, as they are often shown alongside a note saying “Trial location for WeChat palm-print scan payment” or “Internal testing. I asked Tencent for a comment but I haven’t heard back. None of the relevant videos indicate that customers are being told how their data will be used. It’s unclear whether they are meant only for testing the functionality of palm-print recognition technology or for collecting more data to help fine-tune it (or both). The payment devices in these videos are iPad-size white boxes with one screen showing instructions and a camera capturing the palm data. The user who later uploaded the video asks when this feature was released, and the voice replies that it started half a year ago but only recently came to Guangzhou. In return, the users who scan their palms can get a soda for the price of one cent. Everyone is welcome to try our service and support us,” the voice says. In one late September video that I found particularly insightful, a person who appears to be a WeChat employee can be heard instructing people to put their hands in front of a recognition device and record their palm prints. In most cases, WeChat seems to offer a small discount, often below 10 RMB ($1.37), for customers to try out the new feature, submit their palm-print data, and use it to pay at the cashier. The videos come from users in Shenzhen, the city where the company is headquartered, and Guangzhou, another megacity 65 miles away. In various posts, I found a handful of videos proving that palm-print payment devices for Tencent’s WeChat Pay system have been tested in cafes, bakeries, and supermarkets since at least July. In other words, I turned to Chinese social media platforms-particularly video services like Douyin and WeChat Channels-because I suspected that if Tencent had really been testing the technology in stores, maybe some users would have seen and recorded it. (Apple has also been granted palm-print recognition patents before, but it does not have related consumer-facing products.) So how do we know Tencent is serious this time? And, after all, big tech companies preemptively register trademarks and patents all the time. But when similar reports about Tencent’s palm-print recognition experiment got out in 2021, the company responded that it was only an internal research project and there was no plan to apply it in real life. So, it sure looks as if Tencent is setting the stage for introducing a big new technology. One patent for “scanning and paying equipment,” approved back in December, includes cameras that can recognize “at least two types of identifying information including QR codes, palm-print information, and palm vein information.” Apart from a few low-resolution photos, reporters could only really corroborate the story by finding that Tencent has been registering trademarks like “微信刷掌 (WeChat palm scan)” or “WePalm,” and applying for relevant patents in the past year. However, there was only peripheral evidence to show Tencent has in fact been developing payment technology based on palm-print recognition. Many Chinese publications followed up with their own reporting. It quickly made headlines in China, where 800 million individuals and 10 million vendors already use Tencent’s WeChat Pay, and citizens have generally grown skeptical about whether trading their biometric data for convenience is actually beneficial (and safe). On October 14, a Chinese tech publication first reported that Tencent had quietly launched a feature in WeChat that allows users to pay by verifying their palm prints.
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