Iowans will soon be able to leave their wallets or purses at home when they shop at Cub Foods stores. Grocery chain spokeswoman Tricia Belisle says they’re testing a new payment system that allows customers to check out by simply scanning their fingerprints. Belisle says “We intend to have this pilot last for approximately three months and then roll it out to the remaining Cub stores by the end of the summer/early fall.” To use the “Pay By Touch” system, customers go to a kiosk and scan their drivers license, a check and a fingerprint. She says the system is secure because they don’t store your fingerprint, they pull 40 different data points from it. “We translate those into an algorithm, we encrypt that and then we store them at these secure IBM data centers. That number that you end up being, which is about 300 digits long, can not be reverse-engineered into a fingerprint.” Cub has 109 stores in Iowa and four other states, in cities including Ames, Iowa City and Sioux City.
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