What is the value of your palm print? Amazon will give you $10 in promotional credit for enrolling your palm prints in its checkout-free shops and linking it to your Amazon Account.Amazon One, a biometric palm scan scanner, was introduced last year. Customers can use their palm prints to pay for products in certain stores by waving them over the scanners. The company had already expanded its palm scanners into other Amazon grocery, book, and 4-star stores in Seattle by February.Amazon has since added biometric scanning technology in its stores throughout the U.S. including New York, New Jersey and Maryland.According to the retail giant, the palm scanning hardware records the details of your palm. This includes subcutaneous features like vein patterns and lines. The cloud then stores the data and confirms your identity whenever you visit one of its stores.What is Amazon doing with all this data? Although your palm print alone might not be very useful, Amazon claims it uses a subset of anonymized palm data to improve its technology. Amazon can link it to your Amazon account to use the data it collects (such as shopping history) to provide personalized offers, recommendations, and ads to you over time.Amazon claims it can store your palm data indefinitely unless you delete it after there have been no outstanding transactions or if the feature is not used for more than two years.Although the idea of scanning your palm to pay for goods in a pandemic may seem novel, it should be considered cautiously given Amazon's history with biometric technology. Amazon's controversial facial recognition technology was sold to law enforcement and police. However, lawsuits allege that the company violated state laws which prohibit the use of personal biometric information without permission.Now is the time for science fiction's dystopian future. It is shocking that Amazon asks people to sell their bodies. But it's even more disturbing that they are asking for such low prices, stated Albert Fox Cahn (executive director of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York), in an email to TechCrunch.Companies and governments cannot track you permanently without biometric data. While you can change your name and Social Security number, you cannot change your palm prints. These tactics will become more common the more they are accepted. Cahn said, "If we don't draw a line in the sand here then I am very afraid of what our future looks like."An Amazon spokesperson declined comment when reached.
