In some supermarkets you can pay with Amazon One since 2020. (Image source: Amazon)
No cash, no debit card and no smartphone or wearable. Instead, just hold out your hand and the money will be transferred. What initially sounds like a science fiction dream has been a reality since 2020 at the latest.
At that time, Amazon was running its payment project Amazon One in twelve branches of its cashless Amazon Go supermarkets. In the meantime, paying with the palm of your hand has been extended to other chains and the Chinese group Tencent now also wants to push the technology further forward.
With the palm scan, the unique grooves, lines and veins of the palm are analyzed and compared with the existing signatures in order to clearly identify buyers.
But as is so often the case when dreams come true: what sounds so beautiful and simple in the imagination is complicated in reality. And so data protectionists are already fearing a data disaster that will turn the sci-fi dream into a real nightmare.
Numbers with the palm of your hand: today a novelty, tomorrow everyday?
In 2020, Amazon was the first major company to try paying by hand in its own branches. From the then dozen are now more than two hundred US stores of the in-house chains Amazon Go, Whole Foods, Amazon Style and Amazon Fresh, in which the option for biometric payment exists.
According to Amazon, the advantages are obvious: payment is easy, you don’t have to think about any other items such as a wallet or smartphone. The system does not require any special knowledge. You pay by holding your hand over a scanner. And the palms scanned by the machine are unique, cannot be lost or stolen and, according to researchers, are up to ten times more accurate than fingerprints. Also relevant, especially during a global pandemic: Payments are made without contact between people or devices.
link to YouTube content
The system also seems to convince the Chinese group Tencent. The operator of the popular social platform WeChat was reported in 2021, that he is also researching a palm payment system.
What was then, according to Tencent, still an internal research project is now ready for the masses: for several months the company is to test payment devices with palm scanners.
The fact that Tencent also operates one of the most popular payment services in the country with WeChat Pay is of benefit to the group: While Amazon’s range of scanners is still comparatively small and niche, Tencent could quickly make the new way of paying a standard for the 800 million Chinese WeChat Pay users.
more on the subject
Who is Tencent? – The secret superpower
Privacy advocates are alarmed
Anyone who gets queasy at the thought of large international corporations storing their own biometric data is certainly not alone. There are also serious concerns about US politics:
Unlike biometric systems like Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID or Samsung Pass, which store biometric information on a user’s device, Amazon One reportedly uploads biometric information to the cloud, which poses unique security risks.
But while companies like Amazon and Tencent should at least have the security infrastructure to keep sensitive data in-house in many cases, that’s not necessarily the case for smaller retailers. However, a hacking attack on the corner shop and the reader installed there could have drastic consequences.
Because while a stolen credit card is quickly blocked, a cell phone number is changed without further ado, it is not so easy to change your own palm signature. Lifelong damage could result from stolen biometric data – above all, since once stolen vein patterns can be replicated now
The biggest hurdle is the human being
Real experiments by Amazon already show that paying with the palm of your hand is already technically feasible. However, what still stands in the way of the spread of biometric numbers is people.
On the one hand, because the palm payment only brings moderate added value. Already, options like smartphones and wearables for paying are pretty convenient. And in the future, too, people will carry some form of mini-computer with them.
On the other hand, justified skepticism still prevails. Even in China, more than a fifth of residents currently consider paying with the palm of their hand to be unacceptable.
As long as the large corporations do not manage to get rid of this reluctance and at the same time successfully conjure up a revolution in payments, it will be difficult to convince buyers of the added value of biometric payments.
The voice assistant Alexa is also not as ubiquitous as Amazon would like. You can find out here why this has consequences.
more on the subject
Alexa has been a billion-dollar loss-making business for years – now Amazon is taking radical action
What do you all mean? Will paying with the palm of your hand catch on? Or will biometric payment remain a dream that will never get out of its niche? And would you want to try the offerings from Amazon or Tencent?
