How much does your palm print cost? Amazon says it’s worth a promo coupon of around $10. The Cloud and Retail Giant is offering you this amount if you register your palm print at the free checkout stores and link it to your Amazon account.
Last year, Amazon launched the new Amazon One biometric fingerprint scanner. This scanner allows shoppers at some stores to pay for items by moving their palm prints through these scanners. By February, the company had extended its palm scanners to groceries, books, and other four-star Amazon stores in Seattle.
Since then, Amazon has extended its biometric scanning technology to stores in the United States, including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas. The Company says its palm-scanning equipment “captures minimal features of the palm, surface details such as lines and ridges, and subcutaneous features, vein patterns – which helps to create a signature on the palm and then saves them. These information are stored in the cloud used to verify your identity while you are in one of these stores.
What exactly does Amazon do with this data? The Company says it uses an unspecified “subset” of anonymous palm data to improve its technology. Once connected to your Amazon account, the Company then uses the data it stores, such as your shopping history, to target ads, offers, and recommend stuff to you. It also retains your Palm data indefinitely unless you delete the data after no longer opening transactions or using this feature for two years.
The idea of contactless fingerprint scanning to pay for goods during a pandemic may seem new, but given Amazon’s previous efforts to develop biometric technology, it should be approached with caution and skepticism. Amazon’s controversial facial recognition technology, which has been sold to police and law enforcement in the past, has been the subject of a lawsuit alleging the company violated state laws prohibiting the unauthorized use of personal biometric information.
Biometric Scanning Technology is one of the methods used to track people. As it is, you cannot change your fingerprint, though, a person can change his or her name or identity number. The more these methods are normalised, the better for the society. There’s a need to draw a line here.
