Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Amazon One turns your palm into a contactless credit card

Shubham Agarwal
By

Amazon wants to make your offline shopping experience a lot more contactless. The e-commerce company is introducing a new biometric technology that can identify you and verify your credit card purchases at stores by simply scanning your palm.

Called Amazon One, this technology will soon begin showing up in Amazon’s own retail stores — starting with two of the company’s Amazon Go outlets in Seattle.

Recommended Videos

However, Amazon says it’s planning to license the tech to third parties as well and expand beyond just contactless payments. With Amazon One, employees could, for instance, authenticate themselves into offices using their palms or customers could use their loyalty subscriptions at stores without the need to always physically carry the cards. Essentially, Amazon hopes to turn your palm into an all-encompassing ID system for all your cards and identification with Amazon One.

Related
Amazon One
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Amazon One will be available inside terminals at the entrance of stores and at payment counters. Once you have linked your palm with your credit card, you will be able to just wave your hand over this terminal to pay. Amazon says it looks for a number of unique identifiers of your palm and selects the most distinct ones to create what it calls a “palm signature.”

While most companies are experimenting with facial detection tech to authenticate people, Amazon says it picked palm recognition for privacy reasons as a person’s identity can’t be determined by looking at an image of their palm. On top of that, this process, unlike facial recognition, requires an intentional gesture from the shopper. Amazon adds that customers can also request to delete their palm signatures from Amazon One servers.

Amazon isn’t yet saying whether it has already secured any third-party partners. But its vice president of physical retail business, Dilip Kumar, in a blog post, wrote that the company is “in active discussions with several potential customers.”

“We believe Amazon One has broad applicability beyond our retail stores, so we also plan to offer the service to third parties like retailers, stadiums, and office buildings so that more people can benefit from this ease and convenience in more places,” he added.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Shubham Agarwal
Shubham Agarwal
Journalist
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India. His work has previously appeared in Firstpost…
Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe turns the e-reader into the ultimate notepad
Amazon Kindle Scribe.

Just over a week ago, Amazon added four new members to its Fire family of budget tablets. And today, during its Devices and Services event, Amazon announced it is bringing some of the tablet fun to its Kindle e-reader portfolio. And by tablet fun, we mean the ability to draw gibberish on the screen with a stylus.

If you've ever looked longingly at the reMArkable 2 paper tablet and wished that the stylus input somehow made it to a Kindle, your prayers have been answered. Say hello to the Kindle Scribe, Amazon's next-gen e-book reader that will let you scribble with a stylus.

Read more
New malware can steal your credit card details — and it’s spreading fast
An individual surrounded by several computers typing on a laptop.

A new, highly dangerous malware called "Erbium" has been making the rounds over the last couple of months, and it's highly likely that it will spread to new channels.

Erbium is an information-stealing tool that targets passwords, credit card information, cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, and more. Unfortunately, it's widely available, which means that it could be used in new ways in the future.

Read more
OnePlus’s newest accessory brings 80W charging to your car for $39
Official product render for OnePlus's 80W car charger.

In addition to today's full reveal of the OnePlus 10T, OnePlus has announced its new SuperVOOC 80W car charger. This is a huge step for mobile charging on the go. We've seen just how fast 80W can fully juice a device when plugged into a wall outlet, so being able to take those sorts of charging speeds with you on things like road trips or quick errands will be a major convenience. The unfortunate thing about the new OnePlus SuperVOOC car charger, however, is that it won't support all devices.

The charger features two USB ports: one USB-A that supports 80W charging speeds and one USB-C that supports 30W speeds with Power Delivery (PD) standard. If you're looking to make use of the 80W charging speeds from the USB-A port, you'll need to be using a OnePlus phone like the 10T or 10 Pro. Otherwise, you'll need to stick to the 30W charging of the USB-C port. Admittedly, 30W charging is still pretty solid, especially for a car charger, but the fact that only OnePlus devices support 80W charging is a bit disappointing.

Read more