Amazon One Pays $10 For a Palm Scan
Amazon is trying to encourage customers to share a scan of their palm for its innovative Amazon One payment system. The US giant is offering $10 in shopping coupons for the biometric data.
Last fall, Amazon began testing a palm-scan payment system. Initially, the devices were set up in two locations in Seattle, but the offer quickly expanded to 53 stores of the company's US chains - Amazon 4-star, Amazon Books, Amazon Go and Whole Foods Market. Customer enthusiasm, however, seems to me limited at best, as the American giant encourages customers to register biometric data with shopping vouchers worth 10 dollars.
Amazon One works on a different principle than fingerprints. No touching of the device is required, and the customer is recognized based on the shape of the hand and details of its structure, including the arrangement of veins. On its blog Amazon praises the system as secure and modern:
"One reason was that palm recognition is considered more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm."
But the idea of scanning your entire hand and entrusting it to a corporation along with your credit card information may raise some privacy and security concerns. There are no perfectly secure systems, so there is a risk that one day the scan will fall into the wrong hands, and unlike a password or credit card number - we will not be able to change it. Albert Fox Cahn from Surveillance Technology Oversight Project doesn't hide his pessimism in his statement for TechCrunch:
“The dystopian future of science fiction is now. It’s horrifying that Amazon is asking people to sell their bodies, but it’s even worse that people are doing it for such a low price."
Even without a palm scan the company knows a lot about its regular customers - what they eat, what they wear, what they read, what they watch in their free time (Amazon Prime and Twitch) and in the US also what drugs they take. But apparently this is still not enough, especially if the price of additional information is only 10 dollars.
