Amazon Takes Step Further Than ‘Cashless’ with New Bio-Payment System

Cash may very well be on its way out the door here in the United States, and there are plenty of Americans who are not happy about that.

The reason is simple:  We live our lives being inundated by advertising and marketing schemes at nearly every waking moment.  We are being bombarded by the whims of enormous corporations who are constantly looking to mine our data in order to better target us for fiscal extraction.

For Pete’s sake, Facebook is using your phone’s camera to study how your eyes react to the advertisements that you scroll past.  Amazon will show you ads based on what you may have said to a friend in a passing conversation.  This is how invasive and creepy advertising has become.

And let’s not forget that we all have RFID chips implanted in our debit and credit cards that can be used to study the patterns of our spending.

Amazon is now looking to take another step into the Orwellian hellscape of the dystopian American future, and we can only imagine what sort of pushback they’re about to receive.

In a blog post, the company unveiled its own palm recognition technology, known as Amazon One. The technology, first rolling out in Amazon’s home market of Seattle, will use people’s palms to identify them and combine that with details of the palm, such as lines and ridges, to build a “palm signature.”

“In most retail environments, Amazon One could become an alternate payment or loyalty card option with a device at the checkout counter next to a traditional point of sale system,” Dilip Kumar, vice president, Amazon Physical Retail, wrote in the post. “Or, for entering a location like a stadium or badging into work, Amazon One could be part of an existing entry point to make accessing the location quicker and easier.”

And Amazon is looking for a wide rollout of the technology as well.

“[W]e 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,” Kumar added. “Interested third parties can reach out through the email address provided on our Amazon One website.”

Amazon has stated that users will be able to delete their biometric data at any time, but their track record on privacy issues is far from stellar, casting doubts on the entire project.