A Comparative Analysis of Attention to Facial Recognition Payment Between China and South Korea: A News Analysis Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Facial Recognition Payment (FRP) is a new method of digital payment that recently gained popularity in China and South Korea. As of October 2019, although the number of users in China has exceeded 100 million, few studies have focused on this, and media coverage of FRP has not been adequately studied. Therefore, this study examines news articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to compare FRP related news in China and South Korea. The data of China comes from WeChat Public Platform, and the data of South Korea comes from Naver. Chinese search keywords is “人脸识别支付” (facial recognition payment), South Korea’s search key word is “안면 인식 결제” (facial recognition payment).Through data cleaning and comparative analysis, each subject is given an description and category, and the differences in 5 aspects of safety concern, application, development, technology and representative products are obtained. The rapid adoption of FRP in China can be explained by a lower public concern of personal information protection and the direct offering of FRP services to independent vendors by market leader Alipay. In South Korea, however, the increased public concern around privacy plays a key role in slower adoption, together with the dominance of franchise stores in the consumer market. It puts forward the suggestion for China and South Korea to learn from each other and for those other countries and enterprises striving to develop and utilize FRP.