What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.
Also in Seattle and at my gym I scan a barcode off my phone and keep my personal biometric data secure. It’s great. Fantastically, no need to explain anything to a front desk person, either.
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm.
Using your palm print (and actually blood vessels network) could be also more secure than tapping a card (NFC contactless).
I enjoyed using the technology. I did test other biometric payments like with face at the Intuit Dome in LA. But it felt more creepy and far less secure... as I was walking by some gates would open and some random person could enter as me... and possibly charge my linked payment. Using the hand with Amazon Go felt safer.
Wondering if Amazon would be willing to sell the technology, as I could see being deployed in lots of retail stores. The fact that it was made by Amazon, likely prevented to sell the technology to other retailers. Someone like Verifone, Ingenico or even a POS like Micros should go after the technology...
I don't know that there is much technology to sell, palm vein imaging is decades old in the access control industry. The reason you don't see it anywhere is because it was already a commercial failure in that application, by the end of the 1990s.
Amazon was even trying to sell the technology for access control applications, but their sales material were remarkably devoid of any reason to choose it over other biometrics.
Biometrics were a very crowded market during the 1980s and 1990s when it was a newer idea and electronics were starting to make things practical. Lots of ideas were tossed around before the industry pretty well consolidated on fingerprints with a side of iris imaging and hand geometry in some more security-sensitive niches. It mostly came down to cost: fingerprint scanners, even before the modern capacitative type, came down in price much faster than other types of imaging (visible rather than IR sensors, glass platen allowed for fixed focus, etc). The widespread use of fingerprint comparison in criminal forensics also mean that there's an older and stronger academic literature on fingerprint comparison, whereas other types of biometric sensors often involve proprietary match algorithms and you have to rely on the vendor's assertions about reliability.
Of course everything around cameras has come down in cost tremendously since then, so palm imaging is probably reasonably priced now, but it lacks a clear enough advantage over better-established methods for anyone to switch over. Besides, just the fact that you have to position your palm the way you do makes it difficult to install them in most practical door situations. Fingerprint sensors turn out to be very compact and fairly intuitive to use.
I scoured Amazon's sales materials around Amazon One very closely, because I found it fascinating that they were seemingly trying to revive the technique. I was surprised they were doing it as a payment device, but it made more sense when I found materials (I think old FCC filings) that suggested that it was originally designed as an access control product and perhaps "pivoted" to payments later. The strangest thing about it though was how unconvincing the sales materials were, it felt like they were really grasping at straws for a reason to select it over other options.
From what I could find it doesn't appear to have been an acquisition; the regulatory paperwork was all filed under some LLC but it seemed to just be a front company for Amazon which is fairly common for that kind of thing. So my best guess is that it was a pet project of someone influential enough to burn some R&D on it, and maybe pivoting to payments and putting them in Whole Foods was thought to maybe be the hail Mary that would turn it into a real business.
The actual integration with the PoS in the stores was clumsy too, they Velcro'd an NFC antenna to the side of the credit card terminal to use to make payments by proxy card. I originally got obsessed with it because I was trying to ID the suspicious device Velcro'd to the payment terminals at Whole Foods!
> The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
My watch was already there for those situations where literal seconds matter.
Ironically, they were 'retrofitted' onto the payment terminals at the local whole-foods. They used the same "magnetic stripe simulator" tech that samsung was shipping in their phones for a few years about a decade ago.
If you had jumped through the hoops to set it up to associate a palm print with payment details, the system is still just swiping a virtual card in the payment terminal which is objectively less secure than the chip/nfc that has more or less replaced the old mag stripes.
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
Except they didn't in the real world.
The only place I ever saw these was at Whole Foods, and the store's POS terminals don't let you tap or palm until all items are rung up and there's a total available.
Usually when the cashier is down to the last two items, I have my card already out and hovering over the chip reader. The transaction completes in under two seconds.
Palm scanning is slower than any payment method other than cash or checks.
It solved Amazon’s blind spots regarding detailed purchase information and biometric collection in a way that could give them datasets from merchants who weren’t otherwise providing data to Amazon. No intrinsic benefits at all to consumers that I know of, though; presumably leading to zero adoption and why they ended it.
perhaps Amazon needs to rein in the rapid proliferation of low-value six-pagers and the resulting two-pizza teams.
solutions that often look brilliant on paper but are poorly executed or inadequately supported in practice (Amazon GO, Fire Phone, Dash Buttons, Astro, Amazon Wallet, etc, etc)
The said problem statement as described in Amazon 6 pager
Problem Statement
Traditional authentication methods like ID cards, passwords, and physical keys are cumbersome, prone to loss or theft, and inefficient in high-traffic environments. In retail, healthcare, and enterprise settings, these lead to delays, security vulnerabilities, and increased operational costs. Biometric alternatives like facial recognition can raise privacy concerns and vary in accuracy due to lighting or masks. There’s a need for a secure, frictionless system that leverages unique, non-intrusive biometrics while giving users control over their data.
I saw them show up without explanation, but I don't think that's the reason they were unused. If you look at it, it says what it is and to just hold your hand over it to use it, so it's very easy to learn to use and enroll.
I believe the problem was that people simply don't want Amazon to own copies of our finger/hand prints. I intentionally avoided the scanners because of that reason.
This was always doomed to fail, this was almost as dumb an idea as the Facebook Portal. Yeah, the tech is there, and works great, but just like no one wanted Facebook to have a 24/7 camera in their house, I don't think people want to give Amazon their biometric data.
FB Portal was rolled out right after all the media reporting about Cambridge Analytica and how utterly untrustworthy Facebook really was at it's code. A friend of mine was PM on it and I felt terrible for him because as excited as he was, I knew it was always going to fail.
"Do you have chickens in a coop? Hire Chicken Eating Foxes to watch them for you! They won't eat your chickens!" Note: Chickens may be eaten at anytime and will probably be eaten instantly.
> I believe the problem was that people simply don't want Amazon to own copies of our finger/hand prints. I intentionally avoided the scanners because of that reason.
Yep. And for this privacy risk, I can't even use my palm anywhere but whole foods.
I don't want Amazon to own my palm print, but I also love using weird payment technology. So I would have probably been dumb enough to sign up at Whole Foods if I'd noticed that was an option.
After they showed up a year or two ago, I never saw a single person use them in the checkout line. Bad vibes, giving my biometrics to Amazon, and I think that's how most people felt
You clearly saw some value in the convenience. Smartphone and smartwatch NFC offers that convenience everywhere. Even setting up palm authentication feels like unnecessary work.
I used it at Whole Foods cause it did my prime code and charged me at the same time without digging my phone out of my pocket but also my Whole Foods has bad reception so it’s annoying to use
I used Amazon One at my workplace all the time, but I only used it at the self-checkout line since I'd rarely get more than a few items, and the lines are shorter at this crowded neighborhood WF. There, I would scan all my items and use my palm to both log in to Prime and pay. Given that I would be scanning my own items, I much preferred it to phone or watch, as I didn't have to fish them out after scanning.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the real joy of checkout at Whole Foods, which is that there is no annoying, incessant voice asking every self-checkout shopper, "Have you scanned your rewards card yet?" and "Please complete the transaction on the pin pad." It must be sheer torture working all day with those going off constantly.
In theory, but not in practice. The devil is in the details. Yes, Apple wallet and Google wallet allows to store loyalty cards. And those cards can be summoned using respectively VAS and SmartTap.
But... while all payment terminals are compatible to VAS and SmartTap, very few have the firmware and a POS that can make sense of it. So, in practice, beside Walgreens and maybe CSV, it is not much adopted.
I like to go running with nothing on me besides a house key, and it's useful to be able to stop by Whole Foods after the run and buy a snack without a phone, watch, or wallet.
I've consciously reduced my pocket contents from car keys+wallet+phone to driver's license+phone. I'd love to be able to get rid of the phone sometimes.
It all boils down to the tradeoff between convenience and security.
I don't think it is particularly easy to replicate a living hand with all the blood vessels.
And it is not particularly easy to get a NFC ring with a secure element compatible with payment terminals.
I thought that the engineering team at Amazon did a great job with Amazon One. I wish someone could pick up the tech and carry on.
For 2020's-era palm scanners you don't have to replicate a 3D hand -- just like a video chat doesn't replicate my 3D face. You just have to emit photons (some of them infrared, yes) in the correct pattern. The hack won't look like a 3D-printed hand, it'll look like a display panel that works beyond visible wavelengths. It'll probably be some device developed for a totally unrelated market, and then one day "whoops, all those palm scanners are 0wn3d" (natürlich auf Deutsch) will be a talk title at CCC.
But all this is academic. The real problem with biometrics is that when your password is a body part, you can't change your password.
I agree and I get it. But at the same time, it is only used for payment and discounts at grocery store. Payment with a card is even less secure here in US. So, I do not think that Amazon Go was particularly unsecured since it was just for credit card payment.
If someone manages to replicate my pulsing blood vessels from my hand and trick the scanner, that would be fine. I would dispute the purchase, and the store would not even pull the camera footage, and just refund.
Amazon Go was not used to hold access to bank accounts or crypto wallets. I think it was a good technology and balance between convenience and security, for the purpose (grocery loyalty and payment).
A twin or even sometimes a relative (son and mother) can open an iphone and its banking apps using the facial recognition. That is more concerning to me than Amazon Go palm scanning for groceries.
Set up once with the CC with rewards for groceries, hover hand 2 seconds, done.
Apple Pay in the phone or watch are super convenient as well, but they take just a tad bit more of time between selecting the menus in the touch screen for pay options, and then selecting the matching CC.
I save like 30s? Possibly.
Is this tech overkill? Most likely.
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No, apparently eu-west-1 went castors up earlier. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something related to this error.
The site came back around eu-west-1 which, while correlation isn't causation, it does look meaningfully in causation's direction and wiggle an eyebrow suggestively.
This seemed like a bad idea to me from the beginning. Giving personal biometric details to a monster corporation is a nonstarter for both techies and normies.
I agree in theory, but yet I have an iPhone, and Apple is managing my biometrics.
I do not have Clear, or TSA preCheck, etc. but still my biometrics are in the US database.
So, in practice, I am not sure if that is truly a non-starter for "normies" and even some "techies". I already gave up on my face biometrics living in US.
How else can you patch an exploit if you don't try it first? The first step in reverse engineering malware is to try the exploit in a controlled environment.
My fingerprints and palmprints have gone through so many biometric studies through multiple colleges and I know they’ve done experiments with copying and making false biometrics from some of their study samples.
This is sad. I loved paying by palm at Whole Foods because it was definitely the fastest way to do things. You just scanned and you were out. Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime and then tap my watch and select the right credit card (palm scan always used my groceries card). Ah well, perhaps adoption was low.
I just scan the QR code from the Whole Foods app on my phone. Then tap the button to pay with the credit card linked to the account.
For security reasons, it makes sense that if you use your phone number rather than the QR code, of course you don't have the option to utilize the linked card.
Meant to register the palm thing but just never got around to it, wasn't even really sure how/where? That was the main blocker for me -- was never prompted to do it as part of checkout, and didn't want to waste time going over to customer service to ask how.
Steps I remember:
1. Put down everything so you have 2 free hands.
2. Mention that it will take a minute to the cashier.
3. Unlock your phone.
4. Find the Amazon app (this part is odd, you’re at Whole Foods).
5. Dig around in the UI for the store code. They move it around.
6. Present your phone to the cashier to scan.
The WF store I frequent has lousy cell reception, so add th step “open Settings app and get on store’s wifi” (and who knows what all that lets them track).
It doesn't seem like a big deal, but this is just so much more annoying than using my palm that not only links my payment method but also prime membership.
Now I need to tap through a stupid app and scan a code.
We always stopped at whole foods on the way home from the gym, and I didn't always have my phone with me or readily accessible. This will definitely cause me to cut back on this quick stop in / impulse purchases.
If you have an iOS phone you can create a shortcut on your home screen that jumps directly to the code in the Amazon app. Whole Foods app may have the Shortcuts integration too, but I use the Amazon app.
The code both applies your Prime membership and links your preferred payment method.
I believe it’s even quicker to ask Siri to open the Whole Foods app. You don’t need to touch anything and Face ID will unlock the phone while you’re talking.
But you all realize that the OP did not even have to reach for his phone. He just waved his hand to get his Prime discounts, pay and get his rewards.
I get that it is fairly easy to use the app on the phone (although my WF has terrible reception, which is frustrating enough when I come to pick up packages), but waving your hand would still be faster.
Ah, perhaps I should try this Whole Foods app. The Amazon app is very slow and requires a good data connection to launch so it's mildly inconvenient when you've already reached checkout and it won't open for you to get the QR code.
The palm thing was never prompted as part of checkout, it's true. I just did it while I was being checked out once years ago since it seemed so cool and it worked flawlessly since then. Honestly, I found the UX of it really all well done. Even if it didn't make it in the long term, I hope the team knows there were a few happy users out here!
EDIT: I just installed the Whole Foods app and it opens directly to the QR code. That's nice. It also selects the appropriate payment method. There doesn't seem to be a watch equivalent so I'll have to pull my phone out, but this definitely reduces the terrible blow of losing the palm scan. I hope it works well without good Internet access!
> Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime
Haven't the (big) supermarkets in the US adopted the whole "scan and go" thing that lots of countries in Europe have had for a long time? (maybe more than a decade at this point I think)
When I go to the supermarket, right after the entrance, I pick up a scanner, then as I pick stuff, I scan them and pack them. Then when I'm done, you scan a code, give back the scanner, take your stuff and leave. Kind of assumed this was done in the US first and then spread here, but maybe it started here? Not sure.
Kroger (Ralph's, etc.) allows you to do tap and pay, or to scan and pay (using a QR code in the app tied to your customer profile). These work at the regular cashiers and in self-checkout.
Home Depot has also allowed this for lower-value items for several years.
To be fair with scan & go you still have to scan your membership card which would be the equivalent of typing in your phone number.
But most retail tech in the US is suuuuper backwards. They were still signing credit card receipts until very recently. The way you pay for petrol/gas is bonkers.
That needs to be past tense. At most gas stations now you can just tap your credit card and start pumping. Unless you’re in a state like New Jersey, which still has a law that an employee has to pump for you.
This is how it works for us: I go to the gas station, the pumps are locked by default, I await eye-contact with the person inside, wave at them, they unlock the pump, I pump the petrol, then I go in and pay.
I'm guessing it's radically different than that and involves signing papers somehow? Almost afraid to ask.
Thankfully no signatures involved. You roll up, swipe/dip/tap your card in a reader on the gas pump, enter your postal code (archaic security measure from the pre-chip card era), wait a few moments for the electronic authorization (they pre-authorize an amount in the $75-150 range), then pump, and leave.
If you are paying cash, you generally have to go inside before pumping and prepay, and then go back inside afterwards to get your change, if applicable.
That used to be typical in the US as well. I think that when pay-at-the-pump became the norm (using a card), prepayment became expected even when paying with cash inside, at around the same time. I expect there are some gas stations here and there in the US that still operate the way you describe though.
An increasing number of gas stations are completely unattended though — the attached store might close overnight but the pumps are still usable.
I only did it once in America and this was some years ago so maybe it's changed... but basically you have to somehow pay in advance. How do you do that without knowing how much petrol you'll need? Very good question! If I recall I basically overpaid and they refunded me or something like that. Crazy.
Despite others saying that they have never seen it, Meijer stores have this, except instead of a store scanner you use your phone with an app. There are other reasons too, but this is a big part of why my family shops at Meijer compared every other store near us.
Paper checks aren't nearly so common for anything other than maybe a local tradesman or if you're renting from an individual. It's not uncommon to see high traffic places like gas stations refuse paper checks outright, or only accept them from local banks, as the onus is on the receiver if it doesn't clear.
NFC payments have been around for a bit but are only recently very widespread, COVID really pushed that forward.
The only notable big name holdout is Walmart. Somehow, they're still on either chip+pin or magnetic stripe cards only.
Walmart famously refuse to pay the extra couple of basis points that are charged by the various payment-rails-involved-entities when doing NFC payments instead of physical card.
We literally started rolling out chip-and-pin after tap-and-go was already rolled out in England (and presumably elsewhere). It made no fucking sense because it was obviously going to be replaced again, and chip-and-pin is a miserable experience. All it did was annoy everybody for several years.
> I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently
I think a couple of years before COVID hit most cards had it, but many stores didn't support it. But once COVID came and visited, all stores got new TPVs that could read NFC very quickly.
I tap a piece of plastic in two seconds and not only do I not have to give any tech giants my biometrics, they're not added as middleman in the transaction at all.
Oh the alternative isn't taking a credit card out of my wallet and all that. It's scanning my Amazon Prime QR code and then tapping my watch after selecting the credit card. But it isn't "hard" per-se, just mildly inconvenient, and yes it doesn't take much inconvenience for me to volunteer my biometrics. Clearly that isn't sufficiently common a position or they wouldn't be removing it so your surprise is likely quite common as well.
I find scanning QR codes at the POS hugely inconvenient compared to paying with my watch. The discount has to be substantial for me to ever scan them.
Retailer apps are often surprisingly (expectably?) bad at dealing with spotty/no connectivity, and even if they aren't, getting my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it, opening the right app, getting to the right screen in it (oh, did it just log me out?) etc. takes about 10x as long as arming my smartwatch in a convenient moment and tapping it once the terminal asks for it. It doesn't even require a free hand, since the range of mine is much better than that of passive contactless cards.
I like linking to the Amazon account because apart from the discounts (which are nice), it puts the receipt in my Amazon orders list. Yes, at Gus's there's no such linking feature or discount and I just tap my watch after selecting the appropriate card.
Amazon's app is just like what you describe. It is extraordinarily slow and needs a high-speed data network.
I would love that, but it doesn't seem to happen for me if I use the credit card that I have linked to my Amazon Prime membership as the payment method. When I tap it doesn't recognize my Prime membership. Do you have the Amazon Prime credit card perhaps?
The reason why I did the QR code and watch tap thing prior to the palm thing is that I didn't want to carry a single-use credit card.
I'd love the functionality you're talking about. Do you remember how you set it up to get that? Would love to have my grocery card automatically recognized as being linked to a Prime membership.
It's another small source of friction. I don't know if biometrics are the solution, but I do find for example that I'm much more comfortable buying on a website I've used before and already has my card details, rather than giving them to a new website.
The useful data in that story is the eating and shopping habits collected by the transaction. What are they going to do with the arrangement of lines on your palm, likely stored as a compressed latent vector not useful for reconstruction?
Like literally scan your palm? There’s no way that’s on device like a fingerprint reader on your iPhone either. You’re okay with just providing biometric data to a large corp like that. Makes me shudder.
A grainy image of your palm from a surveillance camera capture is not going to expose biometric data. Your hand needs to be close enough to make out the detail required. Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours, not something you can replicate at scale. You’re giving them your palm print/vein scan tied to your identity on a plate. It’s very irresponsible.
I really doubt getting a reasonably good image of my hand is tough for Amazon. But they don't really need my palm at all; most of the point of that was probably that it'd be much freakier to normies if the self-checkout just said "hi Bob!" when you got close via facial recognition.
> Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours…
That seems deeply unlikely. I'm probably on 50 different cameras at a Whole Foods, some of which I'd never notice, and at some point I have to check out, which ties all that footage to a credit card and my Prime account if I don't want to pay the non-deal prices for everything.
Faces are easier to change. Grow a beard, wear some glasses, put on some weight or some surgery if you really need to. Can’t change your eye print, finder prints, vein pattern or DNA.
Apple's FaceID can figure out who you are even with a N95 mask and sunglasses on.
And in most scenarios, you're gonna a) pay with a card with your name on it and b) head out to your car with its unique ID prominently displayed on it.
No one is individually observing you like that, no one has time for that. Your palm print will get run during routine searches in a thousand police departments across the country regularly and with whatever hellscape this administration has planned for down the road.
Nope, just a normal camera + a lot of infrared light.
Even modern fingerprint capture can be done with just a phone camera (but that’s also a feature of Amazon One’s enrollment process - you use your own phone to take photos of your palms, then they’re verified on the entry tower and matched up.)
I didn't even know this was available to other businesses -- I've only ever seen it at Whole Foods.
Curious if they're keeping it at Whole Foods or discontinuing the hardware altogether? Can't say I've ever once seen someone actually use it to pay there.
Well, that is not just a payment solution. It can be linked to other things, and primarily to your Prime account, but it could be linked to other loyalty programs too.
So when you wave your hand, you get your Prime discounts, you pay and you get your points. Just by waving your hand. No need to reach for a phone, an app, a card, scan a QR code, etc.
The tech had some advantages. I used it every time at WF. I liked it.
I've always wondered what the play was with these. I can tap my card. I can tap my phone. I never leave home without either of those. I can't use Amazon One online, it's purely a retail thing. I need the thing it's replacing in order to onboard. So... Why?
If this came around on 2010, it would have been a hit. Maybe even 2015. Now, it's simply redundant, or something more nefarious (but I can't imagine how).
Wasn't it obvious? One of Amazon's founding focuses was "make it stupidly easy to pay us." They went overboard to make it easy to buy things. The most obvious is their infamously patented "one click" purchasing, but there were lots of other things. For example, in the early days, they would let you create as many accounts with the same email address as you wanted because "sorry, an account with that email already exists" was an error that might keep you from purchasing.
The Amazon stores were the ultimate physical expression of this ideal. Walk into a store, pick up what you want, wave your hand vaguely at a scanner, leave. If they could have reliably gotten your ID without your involvement at all, they would've done that instead, but the hand scanner was the closest they could come.
There's nothing malicious about it. They just want you to be able to consume as easily as possible with as little friction or opportunities for second thoughts as possible.
I found the palm payment at Whole Foods to be very convenient for the same reason as others in this thread.
The steps without using Amazon One were
* open the amazon app
* open the checkout thing
* click the QR code button
* click the amazon QR code
* Scan it
* Open Apple Wallet
* Pay
I hope that they will at least add the amazon QR code to apple wallet to make payment faster in store. That or something to make payment (with Amazon Prime link) as fast as with Amazon One even while not continuing Amazon One itself.
I wonder if they could use a NFC tag or something to quickly open the amazon app on your phone to pay or something?
Why do you have all these steps to pay at a supermarket?
When I am here in the UK, I wave my phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's my stuff paid for.
Of course, it's different elsewhere.
When I am over in Austria, I wave my phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's my stuff paid for, but this time in Euros, at the going exchange rate.
You don't. As others have pointed out you can pay like normal. Even if you want to get Prime discounts all you need to do is have the card on your Amazon account. No scanning codes or typing in phone numbers is needed.
In the US, you also wave your phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's your stuff paid for. The GP comment is not about paying (although it can do that too [1]), but rather about providing their Amazon account details for Amazon Prime discounts and other benefits.
A similar process is the case in the UK as well at Amazon Fresh stores, last I checked.
Right.... every independent coffee shop I go to is able to credit me a loyalty point when I hit their toast terminal with google wallet. If I am filling up at Shell I get my points as long as I use the linked credit card. Any other experience is an unforced error.
They also had this as option to pay at Amazon Fresh, which seemed odd to me. You needed to use your phone to scan the QR code from your phone anyway, and they charged the credit card on file in your Amazon account.
These were neat to use at whole foods but I never saw them anywhere else. I guess Amazon just didn't really have much penetration in payment terminals in general. Maybe a deal with clover or toast could have changed things.
Wonder what stunted adoption of this? High costs, users not liking it b/c privacy, credit cards/tap to pay being a good enough experience already? The handful of times I used this, it was nice.
I just signed up and used it at Whole Foods. For me, and for that use case only it removes a step of loading the Whole Foods app to scan a QR code for my account.
But have no idea why anyone else would adopt this.
I'm completely unfamiliar with these, but it seems like you need to press your palm against the device, no? The doctor's office is the last place I'd want to do that.
You don't need to press your palm, you just hover it over the plate for a moment. I think the hardware is just an IR illuminator+camera.
It does seem like a technology that should have a useful niche. Unlike fingerprints you don't leave partial copies of your vein pattern on everything you touch; unlike face recognition it's an explicit act you take so it can be used for attestation-type actions (like paying). It still has all the usual disadvantages and advantages of any other biometric. Perhaps the unique niche isn't big enough to fit a new product into though.
If you trust Amazon, they were never storing images of your actual palm but instead creating and storing unique hashes from that data. Again, if you trust them, they did it in just about the most privacy protecting way possible.
I think they are going all in on Alexa+ and cutting many other teams (speaking fully as an outsider). The new Echo Dot Max makes controlling your TV/Browsing youtube with natural language really nice (same for exploring Amazon Music - Spotify needs to catch up with this fast). Subscriptions for AI in the living room is what they are first movers of at the moment.
This has been the worst downgrade for me. Response times have skyrocketed. The minimum time to response is now a few seconds slower and the responses continue to be low quality. The speaker seems to have even lost some functionality where it says "I can't do that yet" for a thing it mostly could already do previously. If I could tell anyone with Google Home devices one thing, it would be to not 'upgrade' to Gemini.
Google update sucks. Not only is it slower + generally dumber, but their AI alignment has made it refuse to answer very normal questions (I got scolded by my speaker for asking about the hours of the nearest liquor store)
No experience with Google yet. Amazon still has more work to do with making their tool-use calls bullet proof, but I've been able to search Youtube naturally and "open the first video" (this is still rudimentary, it's not perfect yet). Pretty good success moving around the Fire TV app with voice (open, exit), reasonably good at switching Live channels. Really fun with Amazon music, "pull up a Taylor Swift album, but acoustic only, from 2010s ...", stuff like that. It's great, and I expect it to become rather ... perfect in time.
Other things:
- Great for todo/reminders with timers
- "Hey Alexa, turn my lights on at 5 everyday, close them at 12"
- Not great at controlling Prime Video yet, can search it, but not great yet at all. Expecting this to be perfect at some point as well.
Or they've proven that you can use vein patterns in human skin to positively identify individuals well enough that payment losses are an acceptable risk, and now they plan to just integrate that into their surveillance apparatus everywhere.
Yet again another failed attempt to move to biometric identification linked to a payment instrument thus allowing one not to need to carry that payment method on person.
This is not the worlds first biometric payments failure, as that belongs to PayByTouch, nor will it be the last. Having been deeply involved in the technology systems around the worlds first attempt at PayByTouch I do wonder why the "easy" is not embraced by more? I think I know however as it is likely religious in nature and the beliefs around such things. I can vividly recall being told to hide my employee badge while walking through the crowd of protesters holding signage about "Mark of the beast" and more in my attempts to enter the PayByTouch headquarters which used to reside at 1 Market in San Fran CA many years ago.
Wash, rinse, repeat : Everything old is new again. Just give it time as biometric payments will come around once again for absolute, third times a charm?
I guess the "biometric identification linked to a payment instrument" issue is mostly trust.
Do I trust the entity that identify me using biometrics ?
Do I trust it with my biometric data ?
If I link a payment method, do I trust it with access to my payment details ?
With Amazon Go at WF, I was fine to let Amazon know and store my hand biometrics, and I was fine enough with Amazon know what I purchase at WF, as long as I had something back (loyalty program).
Scaling this though would negatively impact the trust. Maybe I do not want Amazon to know "everything" I purchase everywhere (even though Visa/MC/Amex already know it...)
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I was always surprised there wasn't an uproar about these. A substantial chunk of Americans, i.e. a huge portion of evangelicals, devoutly believe a few things:
* The Bible book of "Revelations" is an accurate prediction of things that will happen exactly as described.
* Revelations predicts that in "the end times", it will become impossible to buy or sell anything without "the mark of the beast" on their forehead or right hand.
* The "mark of the beast" would be administered by the Antichrist.
From Revelations 13:16-17:
"And the second beast required all people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark—the name of the beast or the number of its name."
I grew up in an extremely religious part of the US with a large evangelical population, and I know firsthand that a lot of people believe that all of the above is literally, precisely true. It's exactly what I was taught in Sunday School as a kid. I do not believe this; please don't feel the need to tell me why these ideas are not true because I already agree with you. However, a lot of my family and old neighbors would 100% agree with all of the above statements.
And yet, they seemed to have no problem with buying stuff from Amazon with a palm print, or using Sam Altman's creepy Orb eye scanner thing. I'm genuinely surprised at how little fuss there was about them.
They are a useful tool if you need to keep your civilization preoccupied and blissfully unaware of their current circumstances. Existential crises are expensive.
"Keep working! The next life - that's when it gets good!"
I do not think they store any biometric data, they just compute a key out of the image. So, those keys are useless. Very difficult to create a fake living hand with all the living blood vessels with just a key.
The tech here was good but the product implementation was terrible. These scanners just showed up randomly in places and just sat there unused.
I literally both saw them all over and never actually saw anyone use it.
No clear onboarding pathway, no explanation as to what it did or why use it, no clarity on what happens to the data. Just a box sitting there.
It was as if all the focus was on the tech and nobody bothered to think about how to actually deploy a product to market.
What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.
There are certain enterprise applications that particularly like biometrics.
Gym entry system where you can't share your entry fob with a buddy
Corporate access control system, no need for a guard to deal with people who've forgotten their cards.
Time clock where it's impossible for workers to clock other people in/out.
Sure, but that isn't what it was being used for, and all of those places already have access control systems.
My gym in Seattle used this, and it was great. I often forgot bringing my fob, and not needing to explain to the frontdesk person was fantastic.
Also in Seattle and at my gym I scan a barcode off my phone and keep my personal biometric data secure. It’s great. Fantastically, no need to explain anything to a front desk person, either.
I’m team “solution in search of a problem”
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm.
Using your palm print (and actually blood vessels network) could be also more secure than tapping a card (NFC contactless).
I enjoyed using the technology. I did test other biometric payments like with face at the Intuit Dome in LA. But it felt more creepy and far less secure... as I was walking by some gates would open and some random person could enter as me... and possibly charge my linked payment. Using the hand with Amazon Go felt safer.
Wondering if Amazon would be willing to sell the technology, as I could see being deployed in lots of retail stores. The fact that it was made by Amazon, likely prevented to sell the technology to other retailers. Someone like Verifone, Ingenico or even a POS like Micros should go after the technology...
I don't know that there is much technology to sell, palm vein imaging is decades old in the access control industry. The reason you don't see it anywhere is because it was already a commercial failure in that application, by the end of the 1990s.
Amazon was even trying to sell the technology for access control applications, but their sales material were remarkably devoid of any reason to choose it over other biometrics.
Out of curiosity, why did it fail in that market?
Biometrics were a very crowded market during the 1980s and 1990s when it was a newer idea and electronics were starting to make things practical. Lots of ideas were tossed around before the industry pretty well consolidated on fingerprints with a side of iris imaging and hand geometry in some more security-sensitive niches. It mostly came down to cost: fingerprint scanners, even before the modern capacitative type, came down in price much faster than other types of imaging (visible rather than IR sensors, glass platen allowed for fixed focus, etc). The widespread use of fingerprint comparison in criminal forensics also mean that there's an older and stronger academic literature on fingerprint comparison, whereas other types of biometric sensors often involve proprietary match algorithms and you have to rely on the vendor's assertions about reliability.
Of course everything around cameras has come down in cost tremendously since then, so palm imaging is probably reasonably priced now, but it lacks a clear enough advantage over better-established methods for anyone to switch over. Besides, just the fact that you have to position your palm the way you do makes it difficult to install them in most practical door situations. Fingerprint sensors turn out to be very compact and fairly intuitive to use.
I scoured Amazon's sales materials around Amazon One very closely, because I found it fascinating that they were seemingly trying to revive the technique. I was surprised they were doing it as a payment device, but it made more sense when I found materials (I think old FCC filings) that suggested that it was originally designed as an access control product and perhaps "pivoted" to payments later. The strangest thing about it though was how unconvincing the sales materials were, it felt like they were really grasping at straws for a reason to select it over other options.
From what I could find it doesn't appear to have been an acquisition; the regulatory paperwork was all filed under some LLC but it seemed to just be a front company for Amazon which is fairly common for that kind of thing. So my best guess is that it was a pet project of someone influential enough to burn some R&D on it, and maybe pivoting to payments and putting them in Whole Foods was thought to maybe be the hail Mary that would turn it into a real business.
The actual integration with the PoS in the stores was clumsy too, they Velcro'd an NFC antenna to the side of the credit card terminal to use to make payments by proxy card. I originally got obsessed with it because I was trying to ID the suspicious device Velcro'd to the payment terminals at Whole Foods!
> The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
My watch was already there for those situations where literal seconds matter.
Ironically, they were 'retrofitted' onto the payment terminals at the local whole-foods. They used the same "magnetic stripe simulator" tech that samsung was shipping in their phones for a few years about a decade ago.
If you had jumped through the hoops to set it up to associate a palm print with payment details, the system is still just swiping a virtual card in the payment terminal which is objectively less secure than the chip/nfc that has more or less replaced the old mag stripes.
> The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
Oh boy, it saves you 5-10 seconds. Or better yet, pull your card out while waiting in line so it's ready when you go to pay.
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.
Except they didn't in the real world.
The only place I ever saw these was at Whole Foods, and the store's POS terminals don't let you tap or palm until all items are rung up and there's a total available.
Usually when the cashier is down to the last two items, I have my card already out and hovering over the chip reader. The transaction completes in under two seconds.
Palm scanning is slower than any payment method other than cash or checks.
It solved Amazon’s blind spots regarding detailed purchase information and biometric collection in a way that could give them datasets from merchants who weren’t otherwise providing data to Amazon. No intrinsic benefits at all to consumers that I know of, though; presumably leading to zero adoption and why they ended it.
perhaps Amazon needs to rein in the rapid proliferation of low-value six-pagers and the resulting two-pizza teams.
solutions that often look brilliant on paper but are poorly executed or inadequately supported in practice (Amazon GO, Fire Phone, Dash Buttons, Astro, Amazon Wallet, etc, etc)
The said problem statement as described in Amazon 6 pager
Problem Statement Traditional authentication methods like ID cards, passwords, and physical keys are cumbersome, prone to loss or theft, and inefficient in high-traffic environments. In retail, healthcare, and enterprise settings, these lead to delays, security vulnerabilities, and increased operational costs. Biometric alternatives like facial recognition can raise privacy concerns and vary in accuracy due to lighting or masks. There’s a need for a secure, frictionless system that leverages unique, non-intrusive biometrics while giving users control over their data.
I saw them show up without explanation, but I don't think that's the reason they were unused. If you look at it, it says what it is and to just hold your hand over it to use it, so it's very easy to learn to use and enroll.
I believe the problem was that people simply don't want Amazon to own copies of our finger/hand prints. I intentionally avoided the scanners because of that reason.
This was always doomed to fail, this was almost as dumb an idea as the Facebook Portal. Yeah, the tech is there, and works great, but just like no one wanted Facebook to have a 24/7 camera in their house, I don't think people want to give Amazon their biometric data.
FB Portal was rolled out right after all the media reporting about Cambridge Analytica and how utterly untrustworthy Facebook really was at it's code. A friend of mine was PM on it and I felt terrible for him because as excited as he was, I knew it was always going to fail.
"Do you have chickens in a coop? Hire Chicken Eating Foxes to watch them for you! They won't eat your chickens!" Note: Chickens may be eaten at anytime and will probably be eaten instantly.
> I believe the problem was that people simply don't want Amazon to own copies of our finger/hand prints. I intentionally avoided the scanners because of that reason.
Yep. And for this privacy risk, I can't even use my palm anywhere but whole foods.
I don't want Amazon to own my palm print, but I also love using weird payment technology. So I would have probably been dumb enough to sign up at Whole Foods if I'd noticed that was an option.
As a business owner you had to pay a monthly subscription to even have it on your counter! A joke product for unserious people
I used them in whole foods all the time
After they showed up a year or two ago, I never saw a single person use them in the checkout line. Bad vibes, giving my biometrics to Amazon, and I think that's how most people felt
sincere, non-trolling question: Why?
You clearly saw some value in the convenience. Smartphone and smartwatch NFC offers that convenience everywhere. Even setting up palm authentication feels like unnecessary work.
I used it at Whole Foods cause it did my prime code and charged me at the same time without digging my phone out of my pocket but also my Whole Foods has bad reception so it’s annoying to use
You don't need reception of any kind to do an NFC payment, as long as the terminal has network access (even through ethernet).
the Prime code thing is a good point tho
I used Amazon One at my workplace all the time, but I only used it at the self-checkout line since I'd rarely get more than a few items, and the lines are shorter at this crowded neighborhood WF. There, I would scan all my items and use my palm to both log in to Prime and pay. Given that I would be scanning my own items, I much preferred it to phone or watch, as I didn't have to fish them out after scanning.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the real joy of checkout at Whole Foods, which is that there is no annoying, incessant voice asking every self-checkout shopper, "Have you scanned your rewards card yet?" and "Please complete the transaction on the pin pad." It must be sheer torture working all day with those going off constantly.
Prime discounts were automatically applied if you use the credit card on your Amazon account I thought
The scanners were there before this.
Automatic loyalty cards are already supported in Apple Pay and I assume Google Pay as well.
In theory, but not in practice. The devil is in the details. Yes, Apple wallet and Google wallet allows to store loyalty cards. And those cards can be summoned using respectively VAS and SmartTap.
But... while all payment terminals are compatible to VAS and SmartTap, very few have the firmware and a POS that can make sense of it. So, in practice, beside Walgreens and maybe CSV, it is not much adopted.
I like to go running with nothing on me besides a house key, and it's useful to be able to stop by Whole Foods after the run and buy a snack without a phone, watch, or wallet.
I've consciously reduced my pocket contents from car keys+wallet+phone to driver's license+phone. I'd love to be able to get rid of the phone sometimes.
Most of my lunch hours, I take nothing more than a five dollar bill.
A slice of cheese pizza is $2, and a bottle of water is $1. Then I sit in the park and watch life happen in front of me.
Very therapeutic.
A powered door lock and keypad and you won't even need the house key!
A richer zip code and safer streets and you won't need either!
[flagged]
Mayberry’s Mayberry ‘til it ain’t no more. Don’t matter how far out in the sticks you are. Yer askin for trouble.
Just ask the Clutter family. Oop, you can’t.
Wear an NFC ring on your finger.
Unlike your palmprint, you can get a new ring with a new private key if yours is compromised.
It all boils down to the tradeoff between convenience and security. I don't think it is particularly easy to replicate a living hand with all the blood vessels. And it is not particularly easy to get a NFC ring with a secure element compatible with payment terminals.
I thought that the engineering team at Amazon did a great job with Amazon One. I wish someone could pick up the tech and carry on.
Yeah 25 years ago people said stuff like that about fingerprint scanners, and then they got hacked by literal gummy bears:
https://www.theregister.com/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fi...
For 2020's-era palm scanners you don't have to replicate a 3D hand -- just like a video chat doesn't replicate my 3D face. You just have to emit photons (some of them infrared, yes) in the correct pattern. The hack won't look like a 3D-printed hand, it'll look like a display panel that works beyond visible wavelengths. It'll probably be some device developed for a totally unrelated market, and then one day "whoops, all those palm scanners are 0wn3d" (natürlich auf Deutsch) will be a talk title at CCC.
But all this is academic. The real problem with biometrics is that when your password is a body part, you can't change your password.
I agree and I get it. But at the same time, it is only used for payment and discounts at grocery store. Payment with a card is even less secure here in US. So, I do not think that Amazon Go was particularly unsecured since it was just for credit card payment.
If someone manages to replicate my pulsing blood vessels from my hand and trick the scanner, that would be fine. I would dispute the purchase, and the store would not even pull the camera footage, and just refund.
Amazon Go was not used to hold access to bank accounts or crypto wallets. I think it was a good technology and balance between convenience and security, for the purpose (grocery loyalty and payment).
A twin or even sometimes a relative (son and mother) can open an iphone and its banking apps using the facial recognition. That is more concerning to me than Amazon Go palm scanning for groceries.
> Payment with a card is even less secure here in US.
This is not even remotely true. Credit card chips do real cryptography.
It's been a decade since I saw a card terminal without a chip reader, except for parking meters and soft drink vending machines.
Sure, but that piece of plastic/metal can be stolen or misplaced. Anyone can use my credit card then.
Convenience?
Set up once with the CC with rewards for groceries, hover hand 2 seconds, done.
Apple Pay in the phone or watch are super convenient as well, but they take just a tad bit more of time between selecting the menus in the touch screen for pay options, and then selecting the matching CC.
I save like 30s? Possibly. Is this tech overkill? Most likely.
Click on the link to read about this:
Is it the HN "Hug of Death" ?I doubt HN could knock over an Amazon site. They're probably geoblocking regions where that service never operated.
> I doubt HN could knock over an Amazon site
Not every amazon site is cloud-scale. Niche product like this might be running bare metal under someone's desk
Same right now from Spain. I guess it could be a geoblock, although I expected something more from Amazon
No, apparently eu-west-1 went castors up earlier. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something related to this error.
The site came back around eu-west-1 which, while correlation isn't causation, it does look meaningfully in causation's direction and wiggle an eyebrow suggestively.
This seemed like a bad idea to me from the beginning. Giving personal biometric details to a monster corporation is a nonstarter for both techies and normies.
I agree in theory, but yet I have an iPhone, and Apple is managing my biometrics. I do not have Clear, or TSA preCheck, etc. but still my biometrics are in the US database.
So, in practice, I am not sure if that is truly a non-starter for "normies" and even some "techies". I already gave up on my face biometrics living in US.
Your biometrics are in the secure enclave of your specific phone. Apple doesn't have them in a database.
They do have ways to access to them, which is the same thing in my book.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/809154/apple-silen...
I don't think this shows that at all?
How else can you patch an exploit if you don't try it first? The first step in reverse engineering malware is to try the exploit in a controlled environment.
Exactly, this is why it failed. Suddenly in every Whole Foods is an Amazon device saying "give me your hand print!" Uh, no.
I call it plausible deniability.
My fingerprints and palmprints have gone through so many biometric studies through multiple colleges and I know they’ve done experiments with copying and making false biometrics from some of their study samples.
What’s not to love?
This is sad. I loved paying by palm at Whole Foods because it was definitely the fastest way to do things. You just scanned and you were out. Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime and then tap my watch and select the right credit card (palm scan always used my groceries card). Ah well, perhaps adoption was low.
I just scan the QR code from the Whole Foods app on my phone. Then tap the button to pay with the credit card linked to the account.
For security reasons, it makes sense that if you use your phone number rather than the QR code, of course you don't have the option to utilize the linked card.
Meant to register the palm thing but just never got around to it, wasn't even really sure how/where? That was the main blocker for me -- was never prompted to do it as part of checkout, and didn't want to waste time going over to customer service to ask how.
I think “just” is doing a lot of work here.
1. I've already put down the groceries I was carrying, so the cashier can scan them. I have free hands.
2. The cashier is busy scanning, you don't need to mention anything.
3. FaceID unlocks it automatically.
4. What Amazon app? I use the Whole Foods app. I keep it easily accessible, I don't need to find it.
5. The code is always displayed by default when you open the app. You never have to dig around anything.
6. Or scan it yourself under the customer-facing scanner they have for that.
I get it, but you realize that the OP just waved one hand and was done (with paying, getting his discounts and points, etc.).
When we have to reach for the phone, unlock it (with biometric), tap to open the Whole Foods app, and then present the phone to scan a QR code.
While it might be not much more, it is more than just show one hand.
The WF store I frequent has lousy cell reception, so add th step “open Settings app and get on store’s wifi” (and who knows what all that lets them track).
IMO the word "just" is probably the most loaded words in technical argument
It doesn't seem like a big deal, but this is just so much more annoying than using my palm that not only links my payment method but also prime membership.
Now I need to tap through a stupid app and scan a code.
We always stopped at whole foods on the way home from the gym, and I didn't always have my phone with me or readily accessible. This will definitely cause me to cut back on this quick stop in / impulse purchases.
If you have an iOS phone you can create a shortcut on your home screen that jumps directly to the code in the Amazon app. Whole Foods app may have the Shortcuts integration too, but I use the Amazon app.
The code both applies your Prime membership and links your preferred payment method.
I believe it’s even quicker to ask Siri to open the Whole Foods app. You don’t need to touch anything and Face ID will unlock the phone while you’re talking.
But you all realize that the OP did not even have to reach for his phone. He just waved his hand to get his Prime discounts, pay and get his rewards.
I get that it is fairly easy to use the app on the phone (although my WF has terrible reception, which is frustrating enough when I come to pick up packages), but waving your hand would still be faster.
The Whole Foods we go to is in a cellular dead zone. So much time is wasted by people standing there waiting for their phone to load.
I've been bitten by that. I genuinely can't even guess why it needs internet to generate the code. Shouldn't it just be a TOTP-type thing?
Ah, perhaps I should try this Whole Foods app. The Amazon app is very slow and requires a good data connection to launch so it's mildly inconvenient when you've already reached checkout and it won't open for you to get the QR code.
The palm thing was never prompted as part of checkout, it's true. I just did it while I was being checked out once years ago since it seemed so cool and it worked flawlessly since then. Honestly, I found the UX of it really all well done. Even if it didn't make it in the long term, I hope the team knows there were a few happy users out here!
EDIT: I just installed the Whole Foods app and it opens directly to the QR code. That's nice. It also selects the appropriate payment method. There doesn't seem to be a watch equivalent so I'll have to pull my phone out, but this definitely reduces the terrible blow of losing the palm scan. I hope it works well without good Internet access!
> Now I've got to slowly type in my phone number for Prime
Haven't the (big) supermarkets in the US adopted the whole "scan and go" thing that lots of countries in Europe have had for a long time? (maybe more than a decade at this point I think)
When I go to the supermarket, right after the entrance, I pick up a scanner, then as I pick stuff, I scan them and pack them. Then when I'm done, you scan a code, give back the scanner, take your stuff and leave. Kind of assumed this was done in the US first and then spread here, but maybe it started here? Not sure.
Kroger (Ralph's, etc.) allows you to do tap and pay, or to scan and pay (using a QR code in the app tied to your customer profile). These work at the regular cashiers and in self-checkout.
Home Depot has also allowed this for lower-value items for several years.
To be fair with scan & go you still have to scan your membership card which would be the equivalent of typing in your phone number.
But most retail tech in the US is suuuuper backwards. They were still signing credit card receipts until very recently. The way you pay for petrol/gas is bonkers.
> The way you pay for petrol/gas is bonkers.
That needs to be past tense. At most gas stations now you can just tap your credit card and start pumping. Unless you’re in a state like New Jersey, which still has a law that an employee has to pump for you.
> The way you pay for petrol/gas is bonkers.
Wait, what do you mean?
This is how it works for us: I go to the gas station, the pumps are locked by default, I await eye-contact with the person inside, wave at them, they unlock the pump, I pump the petrol, then I go in and pay.
I'm guessing it's radically different than that and involves signing papers somehow? Almost afraid to ask.
Thankfully no signatures involved. You roll up, swipe/dip/tap your card in a reader on the gas pump, enter your postal code (archaic security measure from the pre-chip card era), wait a few moments for the electronic authorization (they pre-authorize an amount in the $75-150 range), then pump, and leave.
If you are paying cash, you generally have to go inside before pumping and prepay, and then go back inside afterwards to get your change, if applicable.
That used to be typical in the US as well. I think that when pay-at-the-pump became the norm (using a card), prepayment became expected even when paying with cash inside, at around the same time. I expect there are some gas stations here and there in the US that still operate the way you describe though.
An increasing number of gas stations are completely unattended though — the attached store might close overnight but the pumps are still usable.
I only did it once in America and this was some years ago so maybe it's changed... but basically you have to somehow pay in advance. How do you do that without knowing how much petrol you'll need? Very good question! If I recall I basically overpaid and they refunded me or something like that. Crazy.
As an American, I always put my card into the pump itself and then fill up. No guessing, no change, no even going inside for a normal visit.
One time I went inside to buy a can to fill up, and I also paid upfront for a gallon, which made the pump cut off automatically.
I've never tried to pay for an unknown amount of gas with cash, and never felt any need to.
Despite others saying that they have never seen it, Meijer stores have this, except instead of a store scanner you use your phone with an app. There are other reasons too, but this is a big part of why my family shops at Meijer compared every other store near us.
scan & go is in most grocery stores but I almost never see anyone using it.
Haha no. US commerce improvements tend to trail EU by a decade.
We just got tap to pay a couple of years ago. People still pass bits of paper with signatures on them to pay each other for stuff.
As much as I complain about Google I use Google Pay for basically everything. I'm not even taking my wallet with me...
> We just got tap to pay a couple of years ago
You mean NFC payments? :| Oh, and checks too? I guess things were very different than my assumption, interesting thing to have learned today. Thanks!
Paper checks aren't nearly so common for anything other than maybe a local tradesman or if you're renting from an individual. It's not uncommon to see high traffic places like gas stations refuse paper checks outright, or only accept them from local banks, as the onus is on the receiver if it doesn't clear.
NFC payments have been around for a bit but are only recently very widespread, COVID really pushed that forward.
The only notable big name holdout is Walmart. Somehow, they're still on either chip+pin or magnetic stripe cards only.
Walmart famously refuse to pay the extra couple of basis points that are charged by the various payment-rails-involved-entities when doing NFC payments instead of physical card.
We literally started rolling out chip-and-pin after tap-and-go was already rolled out in England (and presumably elsewhere). It made no fucking sense because it was obviously going to be replaced again, and chip-and-pin is a miserable experience. All it did was annoy everybody for several years.
I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently. NFC has been around for a long time.
> I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently
I think a couple of years before COVID hit most cards had it, but many stores didn't support it. But once COVID came and visited, all stores got new TPVs that could read NFC very quickly.
No, I've never seen that in the US.
That does not exist in the US as far as I've seen.
There's Amazon's "just walk out" stuff, which they just killed.
Amazon, 1998: hello we sell books but online
Amazon, 2023: please return to your Primehouse for your nightly Primemeal, valued Primecitizen
- krang t. nelson
I tap a piece of plastic in two seconds and not only do I not have to give any tech giants my biometrics, they're not added as middleman in the transaction at all.
Is it really that hard to take an credit card out your purse or wallet and tap it that you were happy to hand over biometric data to amazon?
Oh the alternative isn't taking a credit card out of my wallet and all that. It's scanning my Amazon Prime QR code and then tapping my watch after selecting the credit card. But it isn't "hard" per-se, just mildly inconvenient, and yes it doesn't take much inconvenience for me to volunteer my biometrics. Clearly that isn't sufficiently common a position or they wouldn't be removing it so your surprise is likely quite common as well.
I find scanning QR codes at the POS hugely inconvenient compared to paying with my watch. The discount has to be substantial for me to ever scan them.
Retailer apps are often surprisingly (expectably?) bad at dealing with spotty/no connectivity, and even if they aren't, getting my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it, opening the right app, getting to the right screen in it (oh, did it just log me out?) etc. takes about 10x as long as arming my smartwatch in a convenient moment and tapping it once the terminal asks for it. It doesn't even require a free hand, since the range of mine is much better than that of passive contactless cards.
I like linking to the Amazon account because apart from the discounts (which are nice), it puts the receipt in my Amazon orders list. Yes, at Gus's there's no such linking feature or discount and I just tap my watch after selecting the appropriate card.
Amazon's app is just like what you describe. It is extraordinarily slow and needs a high-speed data network.
Amazon prime is tied to your credit card. One single action to pay: tap credit card against reader
Why do you have so many hoops to jump through like presenting QR code and tapping watch
I would love that, but it doesn't seem to happen for me if I use the credit card that I have linked to my Amazon Prime membership as the payment method. When I tap it doesn't recognize my Prime membership. Do you have the Amazon Prime credit card perhaps?
The reason why I did the QR code and watch tap thing prior to the palm thing is that I didn't want to carry a single-use credit card.
I'd love the functionality you're talking about. Do you remember how you set it up to get that? Would love to have my grocery card automatically recognized as being linked to a Prime membership.
Any card on your account should work, last 4 must match, I have never entered number or scan QR
Oh, then my watch should suffice. Okay, I shall try it next time with a Prime discounted product!
Gpay/Apple Pay added card etc will not match hand-entered card on Amazon site's number since last 4 differs IIRC
It's another small source of friction. I don't know if biometrics are the solution, but I do find for example that I'm much more comfortable buying on a website I've used before and already has my card details, rather than giving them to a new website.
The useful data in that story is the eating and shopping habits collected by the transaction. What are they going to do with the arrangement of lines on your palm, likely stored as a compressed latent vector not useful for reconstruction?
Like literally scan your palm? There’s no way that’s on device like a fingerprint reader on your iPhone either. You’re okay with just providing biometric data to a large corp like that. Makes me shudder.
You wave your hand over a camera.
At this point I presume they collect such biometrics whether I like it or not; they have cameras everywhere.
A grainy image of your palm from a surveillance camera capture is not going to expose biometric data. Your hand needs to be close enough to make out the detail required. Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours, not something you can replicate at scale. You’re giving them your palm print/vein scan tied to your identity on a plate. It’s very irresponsible.
> A grainy image of your palm
I really doubt getting a reasonably good image of my hand is tough for Amazon. But they don't really need my palm at all; most of the point of that was probably that it'd be much freakier to normies if the self-checkout just said "hi Bob!" when you got close via facial recognition.
> Then tying that to your identity is very hard and takes manhours…
That seems deeply unlikely. I'm probably on 50 different cameras at a Whole Foods, some of which I'd never notice, and at some point I have to check out, which ties all that footage to a credit card and my Prime account if I don't want to pay the non-deal prices for everything.
Faces are easier to change. Grow a beard, wear some glasses, put on some weight or some surgery if you really need to. Can’t change your eye print, finder prints, vein pattern or DNA.
That's not really been the case for years now.
Apple's FaceID can figure out who you are even with a N95 mask and sunglasses on.
And in most scenarios, you're gonna a) pay with a card with your name on it and b) head out to your car with its unique ID prominently displayed on it.
FaceID fails more than 85% of the time with a mask, sunglasses and a brimmed hat that covers the forehead.
Again, you can ditch your car but your biometric data will go into a pool that will be available to cross check against in perpetuity.
Now you're "that one guy who wears the mask, sunglasses, and a hat inside".
Pay cash every time and you're even more noticeable.
And then they start doing gait analysis or something, or use everyone's Ring camera to figure out where you come from.
No one is individually observing you like that, no one has time for that. Your palm print will get run during routine searches in a thousand police departments across the country regularly and with whatever hellscape this administration has planned for down the road.
> No one is individually observing you like that, no one has time for that.
That’s what the computers and cameras are for. Ring cameras happily use a LLM to describe people on your porch already.
Isn't it a deep vein scanner? Much harder to spoof than still images or even video.
Hard to spoof. Not hard to collect.
Nope, just a normal camera + a lot of infrared light.
Even modern fingerprint capture can be done with just a phone camera (but that’s also a feature of Amazon One’s enrollment process - you use your own phone to take photos of your palms, then they’re verified on the entry tower and matched up.)
I didn't even know this was available to other businesses -- I've only ever seen it at Whole Foods.
Curious if they're keeping it at Whole Foods or discontinuing the hardware altogether? Can't say I've ever once seen someone actually use it to pay there.
I literally just signed up for this. Guess I have the killing touch.
I don’t see the point though. It is a payment solution in search of a problem. It is a nice bonus first party payment solution at Whole Foods though.
Well, that is not just a payment solution. It can be linked to other things, and primarily to your Prime account, but it could be linked to other loyalty programs too.
So when you wave your hand, you get your Prime discounts, you pay and you get your points. Just by waving your hand. No need to reach for a phone, an app, a card, scan a QR code, etc.
The tech had some advantages. I used it every time at WF. I liked it.
I used it once, a couple of weeks ago. Had been meaning to sign up for a couple of years and then just randomly completed the process recently.
They've had them permanently installed at Seattle's largest indoor sports/entertainment arena
I've always wondered what the play was with these. I can tap my card. I can tap my phone. I never leave home without either of those. I can't use Amazon One online, it's purely a retail thing. I need the thing it's replacing in order to onboard. So... Why?
If this came around on 2010, it would have been a hit. Maybe even 2015. Now, it's simply redundant, or something more nefarious (but I can't imagine how).
Wasn't it obvious? One of Amazon's founding focuses was "make it stupidly easy to pay us." They went overboard to make it easy to buy things. The most obvious is their infamously patented "one click" purchasing, but there were lots of other things. For example, in the early days, they would let you create as many accounts with the same email address as you wanted because "sorry, an account with that email already exists" was an error that might keep you from purchasing.
The Amazon stores were the ultimate physical expression of this ideal. Walk into a store, pick up what you want, wave your hand vaguely at a scanner, leave. If they could have reliably gotten your ID without your involvement at all, they would've done that instead, but the hand scanner was the closest they could come.
There's nothing malicious about it. They just want you to be able to consume as easily as possible with as little friction or opportunities for second thoughts as possible.
> I can tap my card. I can tap my phone
It was convenient in Whole Foods. Prime discount and payment together. Remembering to keep the card on file updated was annoying, though.
If you have the whole foods app, you can already scan the QR code for prime and pay in one action.
And at CVS, I can use Google wallet to tap to use my loyalty card and pay. Amazon didn't have to invent a new thing.
I found the palm payment at Whole Foods to be very convenient for the same reason as others in this thread.
The steps without using Amazon One were
* open the amazon app
* open the checkout thing
* click the QR code button
* click the amazon QR code
* Scan it
* Open Apple Wallet
* Pay
I hope that they will at least add the amazon QR code to apple wallet to make payment faster in store. That or something to make payment (with Amazon Prime link) as fast as with Amazon One even while not continuing Amazon One itself.
I wonder if they could use a NFC tag or something to quickly open the amazon app on your phone to pay or something?
download the Whole Foods app. It solely exists to display the QR code on startup.
But like OP mentioned, you need to reach for your phone, open it, open the app, show the QR code to scan it.
As opposed to just wave your hand, to get your discounts, pay and get your points.
Walk me through it.
Why do you have all these steps to pay at a supermarket?
When I am here in the UK, I wave my phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's my stuff paid for.
Of course, it's different elsewhere.
When I am over in Austria, I wave my phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's my stuff paid for, but this time in Euros, at the going exchange rate.
You don't. As others have pointed out you can pay like normal. Even if you want to get Prime discounts all you need to do is have the card on your Amazon account. No scanning codes or typing in phone numbers is needed.
So, it's someone making a fuss over their favourite means of handing their biometric data to Evil Megacorp being broken?
In the US, you also wave your phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's your stuff paid for. The GP comment is not about paying (although it can do that too [1]), but rather about providing their Amazon account details for Amazon Prime discounts and other benefits.
A similar process is the case in the UK as well at Amazon Fresh stores, last I checked.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
There aren't any Amazon Fresh stores in the UK, are there?
Can they not just associate your debit/credit card w/ your account?
Right.... every independent coffee shop I go to is able to credit me a loyalty point when I hit their toast terminal with google wallet. If I am filling up at Shell I get my points as long as I use the linked credit card. Any other experience is an unforced error.
They have that option in the whole foods app
They also had this as option to pay at Amazon Fresh, which seemed odd to me. You needed to use your phone to scan the QR code from your phone anyway, and they charged the credit card on file in your Amazon account.
It's interesting how despite Google and Amazon both canceling products constantly, only one is infamous for the practice.
Site is either down or aggressively geoblocked, archive: https://archive.ph/LX5PG
These were neat to use at whole foods but I never saw them anywhere else. I guess Amazon just didn't really have much penetration in payment terminals in general. Maybe a deal with clover or toast could have changed things.
I agree. And being Amazon might have created some reluctance for other retailers to adopt the technology.
I wish Amazon could sell the tech to someone more neutral and have it deployed more broadly.
Wonder what stunted adoption of this? High costs, users not liking it b/c privacy, credit cards/tap to pay being a good enough experience already? The handful of times I used this, it was nice.
I was personally creeped out by it at the handful of Whole Foods I saw this. I’d rather tap and pay or pay by QR code.
I just signed up and used it at Whole Foods. For me, and for that use case only it removes a step of loading the Whole Foods app to scan a QR code for my account.
But have no idea why anyone else would adopt this.
My doctor's office was using it. I didn't want to give them my biometric data.
I'm completely unfamiliar with these, but it seems like you need to press your palm against the device, no? The doctor's office is the last place I'd want to do that.
You don't need to press your palm, you just hover it over the plate for a moment. I think the hardware is just an IR illuminator+camera.
It does seem like a technology that should have a useful niche. Unlike fingerprints you don't leave partial copies of your vein pattern on everything you touch; unlike face recognition it's an explicit act you take so it can be used for attestation-type actions (like paying). It still has all the usual disadvantages and advantages of any other biometric. Perhaps the unique niche isn't big enough to fit a new product into though.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense. Thank you.
People don't want to give Amazon their biometrics?
If you trust Amazon, they were never storing images of your actual palm but instead creating and storing unique hashes from that data. Again, if you trust them, they did it in just about the most privacy protecting way possible.
More details in their FAQ: https://aws.amazon.com/one/faqs/
Amazon it on a killing spree lately it seems
I think they are going all in on Alexa+ and cutting many other teams (speaking fully as an outsider). The new Echo Dot Max makes controlling your TV/Browsing youtube with natural language really nice (same for exploring Amazon Music - Spotify needs to catch up with this fast). Subscriptions for AI in the living room is what they are first movers of at the moment.
How does that compare with Google? I tried updating my Google Mini smart speakers to have Gemini and it still seems dumb as a box of rocks.
This has been the worst downgrade for me. Response times have skyrocketed. The minimum time to response is now a few seconds slower and the responses continue to be low quality. The speaker seems to have even lost some functionality where it says "I can't do that yet" for a thing it mostly could already do previously. If I could tell anyone with Google Home devices one thing, it would be to not 'upgrade' to Gemini.
Google update sucks. Not only is it slower + generally dumber, but their AI alignment has made it refuse to answer very normal questions (I got scolded by my speaker for asking about the hours of the nearest liquor store)
No experience with Google yet. Amazon still has more work to do with making their tool-use calls bullet proof, but I've been able to search Youtube naturally and "open the first video" (this is still rudimentary, it's not perfect yet). Pretty good success moving around the Fire TV app with voice (open, exit), reasonably good at switching Live channels. Really fun with Amazon music, "pull up a Taylor Swift album, but acoustic only, from 2010s ...", stuff like that. It's great, and I expect it to become rather ... perfect in time.
Other things:
- Great for todo/reminders with timers
- "Hey Alexa, turn my lights on at 5 everyday, close them at 12"
- Not great at controlling Prime Video yet, can search it, but not great yet at all. Expecting this to be perfect at some point as well.
It's almost like a ... voice operating system.
In other ways too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-wiretap/2026/01/27/immigrat...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46796745
They must have collected enough bio-metric data, or deemed hand prints to be not useful.
Or they've proven that you can use vein patterns in human skin to positively identify individuals well enough that payment losses are an acceptable risk, and now they plan to just integrate that into their surveillance apparatus everywhere.
Yet again another failed attempt to move to biometric identification linked to a payment instrument thus allowing one not to need to carry that payment method on person.
This is not the worlds first biometric payments failure, as that belongs to PayByTouch, nor will it be the last. Having been deeply involved in the technology systems around the worlds first attempt at PayByTouch I do wonder why the "easy" is not embraced by more? I think I know however as it is likely religious in nature and the beliefs around such things. I can vividly recall being told to hide my employee badge while walking through the crowd of protesters holding signage about "Mark of the beast" and more in my attempts to enter the PayByTouch headquarters which used to reside at 1 Market in San Fran CA many years ago.
Wash, rinse, repeat : Everything old is new again. Just give it time as biometric payments will come around once again for absolute, third times a charm?
I guess the "biometric identification linked to a payment instrument" issue is mostly trust.
Do I trust the entity that identify me using biometrics ?
Do I trust it with my biometric data ?
If I link a payment method, do I trust it with access to my payment details ?
With Amazon Go at WF, I was fine to let Amazon know and store my hand biometrics, and I was fine enough with Amazon know what I purchase at WF, as long as I had something back (loyalty program).
Scaling this though would negatively impact the trust. Maybe I do not want Amazon to know "everything" I purchase everywhere (even though Visa/MC/Amex already know it...)
oh no! [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781444#46782289
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Lol
Is this what the 16,000 were working on?
I was always surprised there wasn't an uproar about these. A substantial chunk of Americans, i.e. a huge portion of evangelicals, devoutly believe a few things:
* The Bible book of "Revelations" is an accurate prediction of things that will happen exactly as described.
* Revelations predicts that in "the end times", it will become impossible to buy or sell anything without "the mark of the beast" on their forehead or right hand.
* The "mark of the beast" would be administered by the Antichrist.
From Revelations 13:16-17:
"And the second beast required all people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark—the name of the beast or the number of its name."
I grew up in an extremely religious part of the US with a large evangelical population, and I know firsthand that a lot of people believe that all of the above is literally, precisely true. It's exactly what I was taught in Sunday School as a kid. I do not believe this; please don't feel the need to tell me why these ideas are not true because I already agree with you. However, a lot of my family and old neighbors would 100% agree with all of the above statements.
And yet, they seemed to have no problem with buying stuff from Amazon with a palm print, or using Sam Altman's creepy Orb eye scanner thing. I'm genuinely surprised at how little fuss there was about them.
The book you’re talking about is “Revelation” (singular) not “Revelations”
Ah, correct. I think I've heard it pronounced with the missing S more often without it.
So did you ask any of them about this? These religious lunacy always seem like they are from some other planet to me haha.
They are a useful tool if you need to keep your civilization preoccupied and blissfully unaware of their current circumstances. Existential crises are expensive.
"Keep working! The next life - that's when it gets good!"
No, that's not the kind of subject I'd typically bring up in conversation. That would imply that I wanted to hear the answer.
This was a terrible idea to begin with and am glad it’s discontinued. Hope they delete the biometric data securely.
I do not think they store any biometric data, they just compute a key out of the image. So, those keys are useless. Very difficult to create a fake living hand with all the living blood vessels with just a key.
I know someone that implanted it in their wrist lol.