Dozens of Whole Foods stores will soon let you pay with just a scan of your palm

Image: Amazon

Whole Foods locations in California will be the first to use Amazon's palm scanning technology. The checkout devices were introduced in 2020 to allow customers to pay with their palms. The first Whole Foods locations in Malibu, Montana Avenue, and Santa Monica are now open.

To set up Amazon One, customers need to register their palm print at a kiosk or a point of sale station. To register, you need to provide a payment card and phone number, agree to Amazon's terms of service, and take a picture of your palms. Once completed, you can take items to checkout and not have to take out your wallet, or even your phone, because a hover of your hand over the device is all you need.

It is part of the company's campaign to change how customers interact at retail stores and run alongside its Just Walk Out-enabled stores with technologies that make it faster to pay. Amazon One is intended to identify you and allow you to pay at Amazon-owned stores, but the company is looking to expand the technology to outside businesses as well.

Whole Foods locations in the LA area, as well as in Austin, Seattle, and New York, have been testing palm scanning. It can be found at the company's Amazon Style store, as well as at the company's Amazon Go and Fresh stores.

The kiosk images are sent to a cloud server that is dedicated for Amazon One where an identifiable palm signature is generated. JamesVincent wrote about how the technology works in 2020.

Amazon was able to convince millions of customers to give them data in exchange for a better lifestyle. Privacy advocates will continue to be concerned about Amazon's collection of data in things like online shopping, grocery shopping, Ring smart cameras, doorbells, and now room- mapping robot vacuum cleaners.