(CNN Business)Amazon’s latest effort to speed up shopping trips lets you pay with the palm of your hand at some of its stores.
From CNN Business
On Tuesday, the company introduced Amazon One, which connects your palm print to a stored credit card so you can place your hand above a sensor to enter and buy items at checkout-free Amazon (AMZN) Go stores. (Typically, visitors use a code on their smartphone to open electronic gates inside these stores.)
Initially, the feature will be available at two Amazon Go stores in Seattle, and the company plans in upcoming months to add it to more Amazon Go stores, which are spread across Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago.
Amazon plans to bring it to other retailers — and perhaps places like offices and stadiums — in the future.
Dilip Kumar, Amazon’s vice president of physical retail and technology, told CNN Business that Amazon One had been in the works since long before the pandemic. But the timing could be a positive for Amazon: Customers may find such contact-free entry and payment technology convenient, and businesses, which are increasingly looking to technological solutions to navigate the pandemic, may also find it appealing.
Yet the idea of handing over biometric data to one of the largest retailers in the United States could raise eyebrows, too. Amazon has previously come under fire from privacy advocates who are concerned about its facial-recognition software. Amazon said in June that it would temporarily stop selling its Rekognition software to police. When it comes to Amazon One data, Kumar said the company isn’t storing any information locally on entry scanners at stores. All palm images are encrypted and Amazon stores them online.
The company purposely chose palm recognition rather than another biometric because it can be very accurately matched, and a customer has to make an intentional gesture to use it, he said. Read more from CNN
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