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Forget the titanium Apple card – Amazon's latest payment method uses flesh and blood.
E-commerce giant engineers quietly test scanners that can identify a human hand as a means to acquire a store, with the goal of deploying them in its supermarket chain Whole Foods in the coming months, La Poste has learned .
Employees at Amazon's New York office serve as guinea pigs for biometric technology, using it in a handful of vending machines to buy items such as soda, chips, cereal bars and phone chargers, according to news sources. projects.
High-tech sensors are different from fingerprint scanners found on devices such as the iPhone and do not require that users physically touch their surfaces to the scanning surface.
Instead, they use computer vision and depth geometry to process and identify the shape and size of each digitized hand before loading a credit card to the file.
The system, named "Orville," will allow customers with Amazon Prime accounts to scan at the store and link them to their credit or debit card.
Precision is in the order of ten thousandths of a percent, but Amazon engineers are trying to improve it to one millionth of a percent before its launch, the source said.
Amazon hopes to introduce this technology to a handful of its Whole Foods stores by the beginning of next year and eventually expand the ultra fast payment technology to all US sites. The pace of deployment will depend on how quickly Whole Foods will be able to install it and train employees to its use, sources said.
"We do not comment on rumors or speculation," said a spokeswoman for Amazon.
While a normal card transaction typically takes between three and four seconds, Amazon's new technology can handle the charge in less than 300 milliseconds, said one person familiar with the project.
"Retailers have always been interested in paying faster," The Post Majd Maksad, founder and CEO of Status Money, a personal finance site, told The Post. "Just enter Whole Foods to see the massive queues of people waiting for verification. This is a huge friction point. "
If successful, the technology could also encourage consumers to spend more when they visit Whole Foods, he said.
"People tend to spend more when they do not have the experience of touching anything tangible like money," Maksad said. "The utility of money becomes more ephemeral."
In Amazon's nascent "Go" chain of convenience stores, launched last year, customers are using a phone application to register in a turnstile. They can then fill their bags and take them away without ever passing a register thanks to the computer vision and a set of sensors distributed throughout the store.
With the new manual technology, customers will not even have to bring their phones. Nevertheless, experts say it is unclear whether customers will be enthusiastic about having their hands scanned at Whole Foods.
Stephanie Hare, an independent technology ethics researcher, said some countries with robust surveillance programs, such as China, are already using biometric checkpoints in some stores, and that Amazon appears to have made the decision. not to use facial recognition.
"I think they've probably felt that Americans will probably not want to pay with their faces, but they can pay with their fingerprints or their hands," she said. "It looks less like a joke."
According to Hare, consumers should avoid giving up their biometric data, noting that if a company is hacked, consumers can take six years or more to repair the theft of data.
"Why would you give them this data? People do not understand the risk and they sell too much, she said. "We have some nation-states that are really good at stealing data right now."
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