(The Exposé ) When Amazon first announced in 2020 that it was rolling out its pay-by-palm technology, several privacy experts sounded the alarm, with some calling it a “terrible idea” because there are few laws to hold big tech accountable for keeping Americans’ sensitive personal information safe, or from preventing them from selling it to others or abusing it in other ways.
But that hasn’t stopped people from using it. Amazon palm scanners are found in numerous retail locations across America and have been used over 8 million times. The benefit for users, according to Amazon, is convenience.
In reality, those who signed up to use the biometric payment service most likely helped to train Amazon’s palm-based identification, which is another pebble in the growing rock pile of big tech-enabled, Orwell-style digital enslavement.
In the video below, after describing how generative artificial intelligence was used to train its program, Amazon’s Just Walk Out vice president Gerard Medioni said that palm-scanning has “an accuracy, which is 1,000 times higher than face recognition and 100 times more accurate than two irises.”
As can be expected, once people have been conditioned to accept the idea of paying using a palm scan, Amazon has moved the agenda onto the next stage. On 28 March 2024, Amazon announced it had just launched a new app that lets first-time users of its Amazon One biometric payment service sign up for it from the comfort of their homes.
“Signing up for Amazon One – our palm recognition service for entry, identification, and payment – just got easier. Until today, customers had to visit a physical location to hover their palm over an Amazon One device to sign up for the service,” the company said in a press release. “Now, they can sign up for Amazon One from home, work, or on-the-go.”
Amazon already has a history of data leaks and breaches. So why would anyone hand over their biometric data to them?
