Amazon One rolls out palm payment tech amid consistent criticism

As Amazon One, Amazon Web Services palm recognition service for identification, payment and loyalty membership, reaches a critical milestone with more than 3 million uses, Whole Foods Market stores are going all in.

By the end of 2023, all 500+ Whole Foods Market locations in the US will offer Amazon One for payment and Prime membership benefits.

This means Whole Foods Market customers who choose to use it will no longer need their wallet or even a phone to pay, they hover their palm over an Amazon POS device.

For Prime members who link their profile with their Amazon account, savings will automatically be applied.

Amazon One is currently available at more than 200 Whole Foods Market locations across the US, and will continue to be rolled out to Whole Foods Market stores in other states and locations over the coming months.

Amazon POS readers use cameras to capture various characteristics of an individual’s palm, including surface-level features like lines and ridges, as well as “subcutaneous features such as vein patterns.”

These “palm and vein images” are then instantly encrypted and stored within cloud servers custom designed for them.

However, there has been a steady flow of criticism for the system, with critics sceptical of both Amazon’s aims for the data, as well as their ability to reliably store such personal information.

In recent years, Amazon has been shown to freely provide Ring smart home surveillance camera footage to law enforcement reportedly without user consent or warrants.

In March, Amazon announced plans to begin providing its biometric palm readers at select Panera Bread locations—less than a week after the company was hit with a class action lawsuit in New York alleging data privacy violations within its Amazon Go store locations.

Amazon’s “encrypted” biometric readers do not feature the same security as “end-to-end encrypted” (E2EE) devices and programs.

E2EE systems are designed so that data can only be decrypted by users possessing the correct digital key signatures, importantly, these are generally not held by service providers or any other third-parties.

“We can’t trust that Big Tech won’t exploit our biometric data, nor can we trust them to keep our data safe from hackers,” says Leila Nashashibi, a campaigner for privacy advocacy group Fight for the Future.

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