alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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I saw them show up without explanation, but I don't think that's the reason they were unused. If you look at it, it says what it is and to just hold your hand over it to use it, so it's very easy to learn to use and enroll.
I believe the problem was that people simply don't want Amazon to own copies of our finger/hand prints. I intentionally avoided the scanners because of that reason.
This was always doomed to fail, this was almost as dumb an idea as the Facebook Portal. Yeah, the tech is there, and works great, but just like no one wanted Facebook to have a 24/7 camera in their house, I don't think people want to give Amazon their biometric data.
FB Portal was rolled out right after all the media reporting about Cambridge Analytica and how utterly untrustworthy Facebook really was at it's code. A friend of mine was PM on it and I felt terrible for him because as excited as he was, I knew it was always going to fail.
"Do you have chickens in a coop? Hire Chicken Eating Foxes to watch them for you! They won't eat your chickens!" Note: Chickens may be eaten at anytime and will probably be eaten instantly.
What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.