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Forget tapping your phone or your card, Amazon lets you pay with your palm. This feature is called Amazon One, and it’s available in more than 200 Amazon stores in the US. That’s a lot, but Amazon is planning on bringing palm-based payments to more stores by the end of the year.
The e-commerce super giant brought this technology to several of its Whole Foods stores in states like Texas, California, and New York. Instead of pulling out your card or phone, you just need to hover your palm over the reader. The machine will use your unique palm signature as a form of identification.
Supposedly, your palm signature should be unique to you just like your fingerprint. With that, you should be able to make secure payments and redeem your Amazon perks.
Amazon is bringing palm-based payments to more stores
As stated, Amazon One is available in more than 200 stores. However, the company plans on more than doubling this number by the end of the year, according to Engadget. It plans on the functionality making it to more than 500 stores.
While the technology is available for Amazon-owned stores, it won’t only be limited to those stores. The technology is available in some third-party venues at the moment. This includes the Colorado Rockie’s Stadium and Panera. We can guess that this expansion will include more third-party stores.
We’re not sure what stores will gain this functionality. However, if you live close to an Amazon-owned store, then you should be on the lookout for it to come later this year.
This isn’t without its controversy
As you can imagine, a feature such as this has landed Amazon in some legal trouble. This feature uses biometric data… let’s rephrase that, Amazon collects your biometric data in order for this feature to work. While this might not be an issue for most people, there are plenty of folks who don’t like this.
In fact, the company could be looking at a class-action lawsuit over this in New York. The suit says that Amazon didn’t inform its users that it collects this data. Thus, many people are giving away their biometric data without the proper heads-up. Regardless, Amazon is still going ahead with this expansion.