alt Hacker NewsAmazon One palm authentication discontinued
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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.
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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.
oh no! [1]
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 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.
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?
More details in their FAQ: https://aws.amazon.com/one/faqs/
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.
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?
They must have collected enough bio-metric data, or deemed hand prints to be not useful.
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.
This was a terrible idea to begin with and am glad it’s discontinued. Hope they delete the biometric data securely.
Is this what the 16,000 were working on?
It's interesting how despite Google and Amazon both canceling products constantly, only one is infamous for the practice.
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.