Story at a glance
- The Seattle-based tech giant began rolling out the touchless palm scanners as a convenient way to pay at select stores in September 2020.
- To sign up, customers must go to a store equipped with the scanners, insert their credit or debit card into a machine and hold their hand over the device.
- According to Amazon, the technology “uses the information embedded in your palm to create a unique palm signature that it can read each and every time you use it.”
Amazon is offering some brick-and-mortar customers $10 in store credit to sign up for Amazon One, a technology that allows consumers to pay for goods at Amazon stores by only scanning their palms, according to TechCrunch.
The Seattle-based tech giant began rolling out the touchless palm scanners as a convenient way to pay at select stores in September 2020. Since then, the company has installed Amazon One at 50 locations, including Amazon Go shops and Whole Foods stores.
To sign up, customers must go to a store equipped with the scanners, insert their credit or debit card into a machine and hold their hand over the device. The company says the process takes less than a minute to complete.
According to Amazon, the technology “uses the information embedded in your palm to create a unique palm signature that it can read each and every time you use it.”
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“Your palm is a personal part of you and you alone decide when to hover it, and when to keep it private,” the company says on the Amazon One site.
While Amazon has billed the method as an easy and secure way to make transactions, some critics have expressed concern about the tech giant collecting such data.
“Biometric data is one of the only ways that companies and governments can track us permanently. You can change your name, you can change your Social Security number, but you can’t change your palm print. The more we normalize these tactics, the harder they will be to escape. If we don’t [draw a] line in the sand here, I am very fearful what our future will look like,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told TechCrunch.
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