The report says Amazon is offering $10 in credit for palm print biometrics

Khevna.P.Shah, INN/Bangalore

@Shahkhevna1, @Infodeaofficial

Tech giant Amazon is offering $10 in promotional credit if you enroll your palm prints in its checkout-free stores and link it to your Amazon account, media reports said on Tuesday.

Last year in September, Amazon introduced its customers with new technology – a biometric palm print scanner, Amazon One, so that the customers can pay for goods in some stores by waving their palm prints over one of these scanners.

By February, the company expanded its palm scanners to other divisions of  Amazon stores like the grocery, book, and 4-star stores across Seattle reports TechCrunch.

According to the report, Amazon has since expanded its biometric scanning technology to its stores across the US, including in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas.

The Amazon One is  a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to enter, identify, and pay. But critics say the technology is unnecessary, with similar benefits provided by contactless payment cards, and a potential security risk.

“The advantage of the palm print  is that it’s on you all the time, this is something you can’t lose, but that’s also a disadvantage because the customers can never change it,” security researcher and University of Oxford academic Reuben Binns told The Verge last year.“You can never change your palm like you change your password or other identification tokens.”

Many critics  have expressed concerns about a company like Amazon in particular collecting such data. The firm has been criticized in the past for pushing new technology in uncomfortable ways: selling biased facial recognition algorithms and aggressively expanding its network of police-connected home surveillance cameras.

It is obvious that Amazon wants other businesses to use Amazon One as an identity service. This would potentially allow Amazon to track people around a greater variety of physical venues — not just shops, but office buildings, stadiums, and the like.

The retail and cloud giant said its palm scanning hardware “captures the minute characteristics of your palm — both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns — to create your palm signature,” which is then stored in the cloud and used to confirm your identity when you are in one of its stores.

The report said that palm print on its own might not do much — though Amazon said it uses an unspecified “subset” of anonymous palm data to improve the technology. But by linking it to your Amazon account, Amazon can use the data it collects, like shopping history, to target ads, offers, and recommendations to you over time.

Amazon also said it stores palm data indefinitely, unless the customers choose to delete the data once there are no outstanding transactions left, or if you don’t use the feature for two years, the report said.

How to claim your credit

1. The first step is to sign up in-stores at checkout or kiosk. It only takes a minute to do so.
2. And then follow the welcome text to sign in to your Amazon account or if new then create one.
3. Once the account is created, look for an email to claim your reward. And then you can use it to on any products sold by Amazon.in.
4. Use the Amazon One whenever you visit the store.