Amazon is offering customers $ 10 for a palm scan

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, one thing has changed significantly in Germany: the way we pay for goods and services. More and more people are turning to alternative payment methods, and the giro card is likely to have replaced bills and coins in many cases. But contactless methods such as Apple or Google Pay are also on the advance.

One thing that all cashless payments have in common is authentication. Because without a PIN, fingerprint or Face ID it is not easy to pay. Amazon has also developed some concepts for its own offline markets in order to process the payment quickly and easily. Now you are making an interesting offer to the customer.

Because Amazon offers in selected branches of Amazon Books, 4-Star and its pop-up shops the authorization of payments by scanning the palm of your hand. This can be imagined as something like the customer placing their hand on a device, the individual structure of the veins and other features then identifying the corresponding person.

Customers who sign up for this type of payment and authorization now will receive a $ 10 voucher. Amazon emphasizes that the data is transferred to the cloud and stored there, so the user cannot guarantee that it will only be used to authorize purchases.

Data protection activists are alarmed and find it rather extreme to sell one’s own biometric features for just 10 euros. After all, data such as email or credit cards can be changed quickly, but we usually have the same hands all our lives. Therefore, the new procedure could quickly create a unique tracking feature.

Own opinion

Technology companies are advancing further and further into our everyday lives, another reason to be concerned even as end customers and not to handle their data lightly. It remains to be seen how the campaign will actually be used by customers, but I think that most of them will not be sure about the scope of this decision.

Via TechCrunch