Why does Amazon use palm scanners at Whole Foods and doctors’ offices?

A palm scanner of the Amazon brand greeted me on my last visit to the medical office a few weeks ago. I am not sure of what I call the experience. Unchanged? Orwelliano?

Amazon One is a relatively new Amazon service that allows companies to verify their identity after greeting their hand on a sensor. Technology was launched for the first time in Amazon Go Duration’s convenience stores in 2020 and is now a way of paying edible at Whole Foods. It is also used for the payment and verification of age in some sports and entertainment places, even in Coors Field in Denver. And from March, you can also scan your palm with Amazon One to register in the locations of Nyu Langone Health, which is where I found her. Until now, you will be forced to scan your palm to get a bear in a rocky game or see a NYU doctor, but it is an option.

In addition to its experiments in public places, Amazon One is marketing its scanners as an alternative to fobs and codes that allow employees to enter the buildings of their offices. Amazon is also working with hotel companies and manufacturers that make security doors and safety boxes to incorporate their palm scanner.

Biometric scan refers to the process of capturing its unique physical characteristics to confirm its identity. Either your palm, your fingerprint, your eyeball or your face, the concept can feel creepy or invasive for some. The biometric scan can occur without its consent, as was the case with Clearview AI, the company that built a massive facial recognition database of billions of greedy public photos online. There is also a permanence in the collection of biometric data. Once a company has the details of its face, it does not have much control over how that data is used. After all, you can’t easily leave and get a new face.

Millions of people offer their faces or voluntary fingerprints, however, as a quick and convenient way to verify their identities and make life a little easier. With Apple’s facial identification or the unlocking of Google’s face, you can prevent the content of your phone from passing your eyes, but avoid writing an annoying pass code every time you want to verify your text messages. With clear, you can omit the line in airport safety. And with Amazon One, you can save a couple of minutes of waiting in the doctor’s office scanning his palm instead of talking to a human.

Nuncaberness, something seems fundamentally threatening in the future in which large technology companies use biometry to serve as guardians of our digital identities.

What is especially disconcerting for me about Amazon One is that your biometric data is only another source of data that the company has about you. The technological giant, after all, is a massive company whose businesses cover from its homonym market to a medical care company to a multimillion -dollar advertising network. It is not always clear how to participate with an entity owned by Amazon affects your experience with others.

AWS, the Amazon division that Amazon One operates, specifies in a supplementary privacy notice that it will not share its palm data, effective, the image of its hand, with third parties, although it also collects other data, including UP. AWS, meanwhile, is clear in your broader privacy policy that you can share data about you with third parties, including advertisers. Then there is Amazon.com, which is governed by its own separate privacy policies.

When I asked Amazon especially this, spokeswoman Alison Milligan said her Amazon One profile is separated from her Amazon.com profile, and that Amazon One data is not used for marketing or shared with advertisers. “Amazon One Palm Data is not accessible to Amazon business units outside or Amazon One,” said Milligan.

Meanwhile, Nyu Langone Health spokeswoman Arielle Sklar said: “We don’t share personal information with Amazon One, and Amazon One does not store any protected health information.”

Even so, privacy guards warn that when it comes to massive technology companies, it is better to process with caution: capacities are enormous and privacy policies can change. “Amazon can probably infer medical care data to people about people, partly because they have many different programs and so many different services,” said Calli Schroeder, principal advisor to the Electronic Privacy Center or Epic. “All these things come together and can be incredible revealing.”

Amazon calls its biometric offer that offers a “palm -based identity service.” You can call it the scanner everything.

The key to the future is your body

The concept of a digital key is not so different from the physical locks that have legs around since ancient Egypt. A password, in theory, is a key that allows you to enter a website or an account. Credit cards are also a type of key, since they unlock access to a bank account to make a purchase. However, the big change with biometry is that you no longer wear a key. You are the key.

The central argument in favor of biometric scanners is that they are more convenient and safer than the old method of carrying. A Amazon One scanner works in less than a second, while touches your credit card and enters a pin can take several seconds. Those seconds are added, not only for you, the client, but also for the business. Both parties also have to consider that credit cards and numbers are stolen with surprising regularity.

“It is much harder to steal someone’s digital footprint or the facial printing or palm palm than stealing their cards from his wallet or pocket,” said Ash Johnson, senior manager of policies of the foundation of technology and innovation innovation, or ITIF.

But it is not impossible, and when biometric data is stolen, it is incredible valuable for computer pirates, because unlike a password, it cannot be changed. There was a great violation of biometric data in 2019, for example, when security researchers obtained digital footprints and facial recognition data or around one million people. If they had been bad actors, they could have used the data, the code that represents digital footprints and real faces, to enter office buildings.

Amazon also says that he chose the palm scan on other biometric approaches because the palms do not reveal so much about the identity of a person as a facial scan would do, and because a palm scan “requires some to make an intentional stura.” That protects.

I think that biometric scanns are largely safe and convenience is worth it for certain uses. I am a fan of Apple’s Face ID technology, and I have allowed Clare to scan my eyes to cross the fastest airport safety line. It is possible that my biometric data one day ends on the dark website, but I was willing to run that risk when I was about to lose my flight. At that time, he had consulted whether he would do the same compensation to save a couple of minutes at the groceries or in a waiting room.

It is not the idea of ​​palm scan in my doctor’s office that bothers me. The new system pauses me because it is fed by Amazon.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I like Amazon. I am a member of Amazon Prime and a regular buyer of Amazon Fresh. I visit my local integral foods at least once a week, and with the same frequency, I watch movies on Amazon Prime Video. Thanks to all these contact points, Amazon knows a lot about me, and I am continuously surprised by the ways in which Amazon combines my data in different ways, such as the time Amazon recommended prescription medications based on my edible request.

It was not clear immediately for me what would happen when my palm put on a Amazon One scanner in my doctor’s office. The basic details of my visit, such as time and location, would they register somewhere in my main Amazon account? Would you receive ads for bandages after visiting a sports medicine doctor? Would you get offers about heart options at Whole Foods after an appointment in a cardiologist? And what happens if Amazon changes my mind about the protection of my biometric data or is it declared bankrupt, like 23 Andme? Amazon denies that you have shared data in your businesses in this way, but it is difficult not to feel many.

After crossing the labyrinths of the various Amazon privacy policies and even talking to the company, I am not yet completely counts that I know exactly how everything works. I definitely do not think that Amazon has access to my health records, and it is very clear that the image of my palm, my “palm data”, is well protected. But the uncertainty surrounding any other metadato is enough to address a human receptionist for my next appointment with the doctor.

I can’t escape the implications of all this. Technological giants, such as Amazon, only know growth, so they continue to reach new industries. That is a business, of course, but Womhelming begins to feel when a We website I enrolled for 30 years to buy cheap books now wants details about my body to verify my identity.

Time is long, and once Amazon has my biometric data, it is out of my hands.