__ New age technology has enabled consumers to pay for groceries with one wave of their hand, a development that has been deemed “kind of scary”.
The technology was highlighted in a video of a woman checking out of US retailer Whole Foods with Amazon One – a system allowing shoppers to pay with a mere flash of their palm. __
Hmm, interesting. Not sure what I think about this. Anyone in the US using it already?
I mean it’s convenient. You can’t forget your palm at home. Your palm can’t run out of battery. It’s pretty hard to replicate based on the article which suggests it is "impossible for a person’s palm to be replicated because its scan captured the hand’s ‘underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical, vector representation’”.
I’m guessing this is for small transactions, not buying a car, so I doubt people are going to be chopping off people’s hands and using them to buy groceries (hopefully!).
Could be a useful tech?
See the issue with this and all biometrics is that it’s not something you have, ie : a card, a phone, it’s not something you know , like a passphrase, PIN it’s who you are. Because it’s your biometric data, it’s immutable. You’re putting the trust in guarding that data in a third party. Not only that there’s no way for you to not reveal where you shop and what you buy.
You can’t change your palm, but you can change cards, phones etc.
Using biometrics on a phone isn’t so bad, as it’s store on the phone itself.
I personally wouldn’t want to link my shopping habits no matter how mundane to my biometric data.
Also, it’s very easy for someone to replicate the biometric features that the reader would use in something they could wear.
This is the right answer. It leads to the dystopia. Or… A worse one than now