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Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

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Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#131

Post by teachrdan »

radiorental wrote: post #121
ncr100 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tied to the device and not let leak out there are laws against facial recognition ( https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/portland-becomes-the-first... ) how is palm recognition different from facial, aside from scanner proximity?

To play devils advocate I guess you could argue that Facial Recognition is passive. Finger print, and by extension palm, requires proactive participation of the user. I.e. you choose to hand over your palm to be read, you do not make the same choice in Facial Recognition scenarios.

What if the palm recognition is done without the person's knowledge via camera? Fingerprinting can already be done at a distance. Here's a story about it below from back in 2011.

What if the technology is built into door handles or other objects that require active use?

As soon as there is an incentive to scan people's palms, technology will be implemented or created to do so. However, Amazon has no incentive to let the public know if there's evidence of multiple people with indistinguishable palms, the rate of false identifications, or other shortcomings of the software.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/01/14/197589/fingerpri...

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#132

Post by anongraddebt »

gonzo41 wrote: post #87
MattGaiser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa can't be bothered to innovate. 90% of what Amazon has done should have been done by industry incumbents.

Well hopefully amazon will push enough of them to the brink of extinction that they to will innovate or suffer the fate of negative selective pressure.

Often, you're too late and the cake is baked when innovation is reactive.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#133

Post by autokad »

elil17 wrote: post #61

My college uses these to control entrance to the dining halls. The technology has been around for years and it works consistently and effectively. They want you to think this is something highly innovative but I’m pretty sure they’re just licensing already existing palm scanners.

that's a cynical way of thinking. applying something in a new area is innovative. For example, the iphone was a mobile phone + mp3 player + ... none of that stuff was new, but yet the iphone was incredibly innovative.

this helps streamline a process. one of the annoyances at go stores was waiting for someone to pull out their phone, open the app, and scan. I was like if you dont have your phone out already, step aside until you do, but at least this solves part of that issue.

also the dinning hall situation was probably a simpler environment with not as many negative consequences if a person got accepted into the hall.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#134

Post by throwtheball »

> palm recognition is considered more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm

Isn’t this what the whole product is about, tying palm prints to identity? Maybe they are saying nobody else collects palm prints so others can’t tie to identity?

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#135

Post by monadic2 »

dustinmoris wrote: post #31
poisonborz wrote: post #22

Coupling un-alienable, (purposefully) unchangeable biological marks to any account is always horrible idea. And not just the privacy part, for one, it can (only) be unwillingly altered (eg. by an accident), the same way as fingerprints, so a secondary backup code is needed anyway, making the whole setup a bad sort of convenience feature. The proper solution would be a safe hardware key mechanism.

That's just not true. By definition all our identities are basically linked to a biometric, namely our face. If you walk into your bank and want to withdraw a large sum from your account, someone at the counter looks at your face and a shitty small photo taken from you either on their system or on your passport to determine if there is a "face match". A proper technological solution to the current more insecure human…

Yea but that was fixed with introducing pin numbers on debit cards. We haven't relied on manual authentication of transactions for decades, thank god.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#137

Post by monadic2 »

kleiba wrote: post #59
mmm_grayons wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could (radical idea here) not use biometrics . I don't mean to be dismissive, but what advantage does this provide over opening a web site and hitting "pay" or maybe some sort of NFC tap? This looks like biometrics for the sake of being cool and flashy, which is not a trade-off I'm willing to make.

The justification of biometrics is usually to make it harder for fraudsters to pretend they're someone else. However, one advantage of something external to your body is that if it ever does get compromised it is a lot easier to deprecate that thing and replace it with a new one.

In practical terms, biometrics are almost always introduced as a convenient way to authenticate, certainly not as a MORE secure method of authentication. Just look at how protestors have disabled it to avoid giving cops an easy way of accessing their phone without their consent.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#138

Post by ballenf »

yalogin wrote: post #74

So far what Apple and other companies did is to keep the biometric auth tied to the device and not let leak out. Now Amazon is saying leaking it is the feature. They are using the hand as the identifier, so the biometric id is what is used to identify a person, not an email address, not a random number or a handle. The biometric data that cannot be changed ever is the identifier. It's very troubling. - The privacy an…

There's also this gem in the FAQs:

> If I decide I don’t want to use Amazon One any more after signing up, can I delete my biometric data?

> Yes, you can request to delete data associated with Amazon One through the device itself or via the online customer portal at one.amazon.com. We believe customers should always be in complete control of when and where they use the service, and we designed Amazon One with this in mind.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but that FAQ feels like it was worded by Orwellian doublespeak experts:

- you can "request" (thank you for granting us permission to make a request of you)

- data associated with Amazon one (all the data or only certain data? Do you keep data that's not associated with an account but maybe still associated with my identity?)

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#139

Post by noodlesUK »

radiorental wrote: post #121
ncr100 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tied to the device and not let leak out there are laws against facial recognition ( https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/portland-becomes-the-first... ) how is palm recognition different from facial, aside from scanner proximity?

To play devils advocate I guess you could argue that Facial Recognition is passive. Finger print, and by extension palm, requires proactive participation of the user. I.e. you choose to hand over your palm to be read, you do not make the same choice in Facial Recognition scenarios.

This is not true at all. One of the reasons fingerprints and DNA are so valuable is that they are left behind by people as they go about their business, and you can go in retrospectively without their knowledge and collect their biometrics.
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