__ New age technology has enabled consumers to pay for groceries with one wave of their hand, a development that has been deemed “kind of scary”.
The technology was highlighted in a video of a woman checking out of US retailer Whole Foods with Amazon One – a system allowing shoppers to pay with a mere flash of their palm. __
Hmm, interesting. Not sure what I think about this. Anyone in the US using it already?
I mean it’s convenient. You can’t forget your palm at home. Your palm can’t run out of battery. It’s pretty hard to replicate based on the article which suggests it is "impossible for a person’s palm to be replicated because its scan captured the hand’s ‘underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical, vector representation’”.
I’m guessing this is for small transactions, not buying a car, so I doubt people are going to be chopping off people’s hands and using them to buy groceries (hopefully!).
Could be a useful tech?
There is a significant difference. Your fingerprint information is stored on the phone, and you can remove that information anytime you want, even dispose the phone if you have to. In this case a company will have your biometric information and “hopefully” protect it. Because once it is stolen, you cannot change your hand just like you would change your password.
It’s not even your finger print information that’s stored on the phone. It’s information that your fingerprint unlocks. If you give me your phone, I can’t get that use out of that information. The same way websited don’t save your actual passwords, your phone doesn’t save your actual fingerprint.
I totally agree, I just didn’t want to elaborate at the time. The biometric data on a phone is supposed to be local to the phone and not stored at the enterprise level.
I would never, ever, trust my biometric data to some unaccountable corporation - not matter what types of promises they may make.