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News hardware & software 03 August 2021, 17:33

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 Pays $10 For a Palm Scan - picture #1
The system seems convenient and easy to use. However, questions about privacy and security are open. Source: nairametrics.

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.

  1. Amazon One - official website
  2. Amazon One Introduction
  3. Amazon Tests the Option to Pay Using Your Palm

Konrad Sarzynski

Konrad Sarzynski

He has enjoyed writing since childhood and always dreamed of writing his own book. He just never expected it to be a scientific monograph. He recently earned a doctorate in urban development, and is also working in scientific publishing, where he manages several journals and cares for the quality of the papers published there. He began his adventure with Gamepressure in late 2020 in the Tech department. He became heavily involved with the tech newsroom, and for a brief moment even ran it. Currently, he keeps an evening and weekend shift in the Tech section, and contributes to journalistic texts during the day. If a picture has a bad caption in a review, it's probably his fault. He has been playing since forever, and also likes to talk a lot. In 2019, he decided to combine both passions and started streaming on Twitch. A small but remarkable community has formed around his channel, which he considers one of his greatest achievements. He also has a cat and a wife.

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