Daily Management Review

Amazon promises customers $10 each for palm prints


08/04/2021


Amazon will pay $10 each to customers who link their palm prints to their accounts. This will allow the company to better target ads and tailor offers. Experts fear that the data collected could be used for surveillance.



Donald Trung Quoc Don
Donald Trung Quoc Don
Amazon has promised to give away $10 worth of coupons to customers who scan their palm and link the print to their online shop account in its shops without an Amazon Go cash register, TechCrunch reported. Shoppers will be able to spend the coupons on purchases at Amazon.

In 2019, Amazon patented technology that allows customers to pay for goods by putting their palm up to a biometric scanner. Such scanners are now installed in Amazon's offline shops in several US states, including Washington, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Texas.

Linking a palm print to an account will allow Amazon to use a shopper's purchase history and other data to target ads and tailor recommendations for them, TechCrunch writes. Amazon claims that palm scanning allows it to "capture its smallest characteristics" in the form of lines and even vein patterns and create "a kind of signature" that can be saved in the cloud and used to confirm identity when making a purchase. The company assures that the biometric data is stored securely and will be destroyed if a customer decides to delete their account or does not use the feature for two years. 

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the proposal to exchange fingerprints for coupons. For his part, Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of New York's Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, criticised the idea. "The grim future of science fiction is upon us. It's appalling that Amazon is asking people to sell their bodies, but it's even worse that people are doing it at such a low price," he told TechCrunch. The expert noted that biometrics is the only way companies and governments can keep track of people all the time.

source: techcrunch.com