``What If My Face Gets Scanned Without Consent'': Older Adults' Experiences with Biometric Payment

Paper Title

“What If My Face Gets Scanned Without Consent”: Older Adults' Experiences with Biometric Payment

Publication Info

• Topic area: Older adults’ perceptions, concerns, and practices regarding biometric payment systems.
• Keywords: Biometric payment, older adults, digital payment, security, privacy, usability, cognitive confirmation, protective behaviors, user experience, China.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Older adults’ perceptions and practices regarding biometric payment systems remain underexplored, with limited understanding of their motivations, concerns, and desired improvements.
• Significance: Addressing this gap is critical to promoting digital inclusion and ensuring that older adults can safely and effectively use biometric payment systems.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has focused on younger users and general digital payment systems, highlighting benefits like convenience and security but also concerns about privacy and usability. However, older adults face unique challenges, such as age-related cognitive and physical declines, and their specific needs in biometric payment contexts are not well understood.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Semi-structured interviews with 22 older adults in China to investigate their motivations, concerns, protective behaviors, and desired improvements for biometric payment systems.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of older adults’ motivations and concerns, including trade-offs between convenience and security.
  2. Analysis of protective behaviors adopted by older adults to mitigate risks in biometric payment.
  3. Exploration of older adults’ desired features, such as cognitive confirmation mechanisms and improved guidance.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted interviews with participants aged 50–73, including both users and non-users of biometric payment.
  • Thematic analysis of interview transcripts to extract themes related to motivations, concerns, protective behaviors, and desired improvements.
  • Recruitment through senior activity centers, social media, and snowball sampling to ensure diverse representation.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Motivations: Convenience, perceived security, social influence, and app-based incentives drive adoption.
  • Concerns: Lack of control, security and privacy risks (e.g., biometric data leakage, hacking), low adaptability to aging-related changes, and limited knowledge.
  • Protective behaviors: Limiting biometric data disclosure, using private devices, enabling transaction notifications, and linking low-balance cards.
  • Desired improvements: Lightweight and personalized cognitive confirmation mechanisms (e.g., facial actions, voice input, visual patterns) and better guidance on usage and risks.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a nuanced understanding of older adults’ unique needs and challenges in biometric payment, which has been largely overlooked in prior research.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Sample: 22 older adults from seven cities in China, spanning four city tiers.
  • Methods: Semi-structured interviews with an average duration of 28.43 minutes.
  • Analysis: Inductive thematic coding to identify key themes and sub-themes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited generalizability due to cultural and regional focus on China.
  • Gender imbalance in the sample (predominantly female participants).
  • Exclusion of older adults with no mobile payment experience.
  • Future work should explore cultural differences, newer biometric technologies, and systematic comparisons of biometric payment methods.

Summary

This study investigates older adults’ experiences with biometric payment systems through interviews with 22 participants in China. Key motivations include convenience and perceived security, while concerns center on privacy risks, lack of control, and adaptability challenges. Older adults adopt protective behaviors like limiting biometric data disclosure and using low-balance cards. They also desire improvements such as cognitive confirmation mechanisms and better guidance. The findings highlight tensions between ease of use and security, as well as gaps between perceptions and technical realities. Recommendations include integrating protective measures, enhancing user control, and providing tailored educational support to promote inclusive biometric payment systems.