Amazon have announced a new innovative palm scanner payment system called Amazon One, revealed several months after the development of a hand scanning payment method was reported by unofficial sources.
Amazon One is said to be a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to make everyday activities like paying at a store easier. Interestingly the announcement comes in the midst of a global pandemic where people are trying to avoid needlessly touching things and by the looks of it the palm scanner has been developed to avoid it by simply requiring a customer to hover their palm over the specified location.
Amazon has identified palm recognition as more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm. They also explain that no two palms are alike making it easy for their technology to accurately create palm signatures. The devices will initially be rolled out in select US Amazon stores and can be used by customers who have registered their palm print either at the terminal itself or through their Amazon account.
The whole ideology around the device is interesting. A person wouldn’t need to search around for their card or phone, they would simply place their readily available limb onto the reader and pay. Domineering Amazon are a clear competitor to the retail industry. Knowing this, would outside retailers actually want to implement the hand-scanning payment system of such a prominent competitor knowing that they are ‘handing’ their business intelligence over to them? It’s clear that the device could track the purchase patterns of a customer letting Amazon advertise their own products & services accordingly.
