I doubt it's used as a primary means of identification. Apple's faceid has trouble identifying some siblings and twins. I can't imagine how many impossible-to-discern faces there are in a country with a billion people.

I saw already on TikTok someone utilized Alipay face payment while wearing a mask. So I assume the Computer Vision is quite good.

I'm not sure whether that proves anything or not. It could be a tech demo or publicity stunt, for instance. If anything, if the first time you're hearing about it is through a tiktok video, rather than some sort of press release or news story, makes me think it's not a real production system.

It's real. It's also not new in China. At quite a few places we HAD to use face identification. To check into a hotel for instance a computer scans your face in some provinces.

My original comment said I doubted it was used as a primary means of identification. I have no doubt that they use it as a second factor, but using it as the only factor (ie. based on a face scan alone, determining who to bill) is doubtful.

For what it's worth, I can confirm that I've seen my girlfriend use facial recognition to identify and authenticate herself and authorize payment via Alipay at a self checkout at a grocery store, using a camera on the self checkout machine. She probably got a message on her phone once she did, but there was no second factor.

This is the video that I saw btw https://www.tiktok.com/@roger311/video/6816922140231601414?l...

The tiktok I watched was something similar to daily VLOG so I am pretty sure it is not a demo or trial product but a general purpose one.