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Amazon’s ‘One’ palm scanner payment technology is launching at more than 65 Whole Foods stores in California. This is the largest planned rollout of the technology to date for stores in Malibu, Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area and Santa Cruz.
When the checkout devices were first announced in 2020, Amazon One was only available at Amazon Go stores, eventually expanding to Whole Foods stores in Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York City. Customers can try the look on hand at the Amazon Style Fashion store in Glendale, California with select Hot & Go stores.
Amazon One is part of the company’s mission to use “contactless” technology for faster payments. The technology works like this: Users visit a kiosk or point of sale at participating locations to link their palm and payment card to the service. Then all they have to do during the checkout process is hover their hand over the scanner to complete the transaction.
Amazon One uses machine learning to create palm signatures to identify customers. When the kiosk takes a photo of the user’s palm, the company doesn’t store the image there, instead encrypting it and sending it to a server for matching.
As Amazon customers continue to provide their data for a more convenient shopping experience, privacy concerns increase.
If you use facial recognition or fingerprint scanners, you already use biometric data. However, some users may disagree with the idea that Amazon might allow a company to track your activity.
Even a group of US senators has expressed concern about the palm scanning system. In an open letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Senators Amy Klobuchar, Bill Cassidy and Jon Ossoff wrote, “Unlike biometric systems like Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID or Samsung Pass, which store biometric data on the user’s device, Amazon One reportedly uploads biometric data to the cloud, which is unique.” Increases security risks.
Last year, Amazon acquired ticketing company AXS, which plans to implement Amazon One at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver, Colorado. Shortly after the announcement, hundreds of music fans, artists and human rights groups called on Red Rocks to abandon the technology and ban all biometric surveillance tools, such as palm scans and facial recognition. In fact, Amazon has signed a letter citing concerns about sharing Palm Print data with government agencies and hackers who could steal the data from the cloud.
Amazon is known to store Alexa’s voice data, so people are not wrong to harass it. Amazon has also sold biometric facial recognition services to US law enforcement, and the Ring Camera company also works with police.
The company last week unveiled iRobot, a smart room-mapping robot vacuum cleaner loaded with advanced sensors, so it may have gotten more data-gathering methods.
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