You clearly saw some value in the convenience. Smartphone and smartwatch NFC offers that convenience everywhere. Even setting up palm authentication feels like unnecessary work.

the Prime code thing is a good point tho

But... while all payment terminals are compatible to VAS and SmartTap, very few have the firmware and a POS that can make sense of it. So, in practice, beside Walgreens and maybe CSV, it is not much adopted.

I am surprised nobody has mentioned the real joy of checkout at Whole Foods, which is that there is no annoying, incessant voice asking every self-checkout shopper, "Have you scanned your rewards card yet?" and "Please complete the transaction on the pin pad." It must be sheer torture working all day with those going off constantly.

Unlike your palmprint, you can get a new ring with a new private key if yours is compromised.

I thought that the engineering team at Amazon did a great job with Amazon One. I wish someone could pick up the tech and carry on.

https://www.theregister.com/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fi...

For 2020's-era palm scanners you don't have to replicate a 3D hand -- just like a video chat doesn't replicate my 3D face. You just have to emit photons (some of them infrared, yes) in the correct pattern. The hack won't look like a 3D-printed hand, it'll look like a display panel that works beyond visible wavelengths. It'll probably be some device developed for a totally unrelated market, and then one day "whoops, all those palm scanners are 0wn3d" (natürlich auf Deutsch) will be a talk title at CCC.

But all this is academic. The real problem with biometrics is that when your password is a body part, you can't change your password.

If someone manages to replicate my pulsing blood vessels from my hand and trick the scanner, that would be fine. I would dispute the purchase, and the store would not even pull the camera footage, and just refund.

Amazon Go was not used to hold access to bank accounts or crypto wallets. I think it was a good technology and balance between convenience and security, for the purpose (grocery loyalty and payment).

A twin or even sometimes a relative (son and mother) can open an iphone and its banking apps using the facial recognition. That is more concerning to me than Amazon Go palm scanning for groceries.

This is not even remotely true. Credit card chips do real cryptography.

It's been a decade since I saw a card terminal without a chip reader, except for parking meters and soft drink vending machines.

Just ask the Clutter family. Oop, you can’t.

A slice of cheese pizza is $2, and a bottle of water is $1. Then I sit in the park and watch life happen in front of me.

Very therapeutic.

Set up once with the CC with rewards for groceries, hover hand 2 seconds, done.

Apple Pay in the phone or watch are super convenient as well, but they take just a tad bit more of time between selecting the menus in the touch screen for pay options, and then selecting the matching CC.

I save like 30s? Possibly. Is this tech overkill? Most likely.

Gym entry system where you can't share your entry fob with a buddy

Corporate access control system, no need for a guard to deal with people who've forgotten their cards.

Time clock where it's impossible for workers to clock other people in/out.

I’m team “solution in search of a problem”

Using your palm print (and actually blood vessels network) could be also more secure than tapping a card (NFC contactless).

I enjoyed using the technology. I did test other biometric payments like with face at the Intuit Dome in LA. But it felt more creepy and far less secure... as I was walking by some gates would open and some random person could enter as me... and possibly charge my linked payment. Using the hand with Amazon Go felt safer.

Wondering if Amazon would be willing to sell the technology, as I could see being deployed in lots of retail stores. The fact that it was made by Amazon, likely prevented to sell the technology to other retailers. Someone like Verifone, Ingenico or even a POS like Micros should go after the technology...

Amazon was even trying to sell the technology for access control applications, but their sales material were remarkably devoid of any reason to choose it over other biometrics.

Of course everything around cameras has come down in cost tremendously since then, so palm imaging is probably reasonably priced now, but it lacks a clear enough advantage over better-established methods for anyone to switch over. Besides, just the fact that you have to position your palm the way you do makes it difficult to install them in most practical door situations. Fingerprint sensors turn out to be very compact and fairly intuitive to use.

I scoured Amazon's sales materials around Amazon One very closely, because I found it fascinating that they were seemingly trying to revive the technique. I was surprised they were doing it as a payment device, but it made more sense when I found materials (I think old FCC filings) that suggested that it was originally designed as an access control product and perhaps "pivoted" to payments later. The strangest thing about it though was how unconvincing the sales materials were, it felt like they were really grasping at straws for a reason to select it over other options.

From what I could find it doesn't appear to have been an acquisition; the regulatory paperwork was all filed under some LLC but it seemed to just be a front company for Amazon which is fairly common for that kind of thing. So my best guess is that it was a pet project of someone influential enough to burn some R&D on it, and maybe pivoting to payments and putting them in Whole Foods was thought to maybe be the hail Mary that would turn it into a real business.

The actual integration with the PoS in the stores was clumsy too, they Velcro'd an NFC antenna to the side of the credit card terminal to use to make payments by proxy card. I originally got obsessed with it because I was trying to ID the suspicious device Velcro'd to the payment terminals at Whole Foods!

My watch was already there for those situations where literal seconds matter.

Ironically, they were 'retrofitted' onto the payment terminals at the local whole-foods. They used the same "magnetic stripe simulator" tech that samsung was shipping in their phones for a few years about a decade ago.

If you had jumped through the hoops to set it up to associate a palm print with payment details, the system is still just swiping a virtual card in the payment terminal which is objectively less secure than the chip/nfc that has more or less replaced the old mag stripes.

Oh boy, it saves you 5-10 seconds. Or better yet, pull your card out while waiting in line so it's ready when you go to pay.

Except they didn't in the real world.

The only place I ever saw these was at Whole Foods, and the store's POS terminals don't let you tap or palm until all items are rung up and there's a total available.

Usually when the cashier is down to the last two items, I have my card already out and hovering over the chip reader. The transaction completes in under two seconds.

Palm scanning is slower than any payment method other than cash or checks.

solutions that often look brilliant on paper but are poorly executed or inadequately supported in practice (Amazon GO, Fire Phone, Dash Buttons, Astro, Amazon Wallet, etc, etc)

Problem Statement Traditional authentication methods like ID cards, passwords, and physical keys are cumbersome, prone to loss or theft, and inefficient in high-traffic environments. In retail, healthcare, and enterprise settings, these lead to delays, security vulnerabilities, and increased operational costs. Biometric alternatives like facial recognition can raise privacy concerns and vary in accuracy due to lighting or masks. There’s a need for a secure, frictionless system that leverages unique, non-intrusive biometrics while giving users control over their data.

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.

Yep. And for this privacy risk, I can't even use my palm anywhere but whole foods.