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Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

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Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#141

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bastawhiz wrote: post #133

I've always wondered what the play was with these. I can tap my card. I can tap my phone. I never leave home without either of those. I can't use Amazon One online, it's purely a retail thing. I need the thing it's replacing in order to onboard. So... Why? If this came around on 2010, it would have been a hit. Maybe even 2015. Now, it's simply redundant, or something more nefarious (but I can't imagine how).

> I can tap my card. I can tap my phone

It was convenient in Whole Foods. Prime discount and payment together. Remembering to keep the card on file updated was annoying, though.

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#142

Post by jnaina »

toephu2 wrote: post #85
cmiles8 wrote: post #77

The tech here was good but the product implementation was terrible. These scanners just showed up randomly in places and just sat there unused. I literally both saw them all over and never actually saw anyone use it. No clear onboarding pathway, no explanation as to what it did or why use it, no clarity on what happens to the data. Just a box sitting there. It was as if all the focus was on the tech and nobody bother…

What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.

perhaps Amazon needs to rein in the rapid proliferation of low-value six-pagers and the resulting two-pizza teams.

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)

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#143

Post by driverdan »

llsf wrote: post #124
toephu2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.

The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm. 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…

> The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.

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.

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#144

Post by octoberfranklin »

llsf wrote: post #127
octoberfranklin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wear an NFC ring on your finger. Unlike your palmprint, you can get a new ring with a new private key if yours is compromised.

It all boils down to the tradeoff between convenience and security. I don't think it is particularly easy to replicate a living hand with all the blood vessels. And it is not particularly easy to get a NFC ring with a secure element compatible with payment terminals. 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.

Yeah 25 years ago people said stuff like that about fingerprint scanners, and then they got hacked by literal gummy bears:

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.

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#145

Post by driverdan »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #70
Helithumper wrote: post #57

I found the palm payment at Whole Foods to be very convenient for the same reason as others in this thread. The steps without using Amazon One were * open the amazon app * open the checkout thing * click the QR code button * click the amazon QR code * Scan it * Open Apple Wallet * Pay I hope that they will at least add the amazon QR code to apple wallet to make payment faster in store. That or something to make payme…

Walk me through it. Why do you have all these steps to pay at a supermarket? When I am here in the UK, I wave my phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's my stuff paid for. Of course, it's different elsewhere. When I am over in Austria, I wave my phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's my stuff paid for, but this time in Euros , at the going exchange rate.

You don't. As others have pointed out you can pay like normal. Even if you want to get Prime discounts all you need to do is have the card on your Amazon account. No scanning codes or typing in phone numbers is needed.

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#148

Post by wiml »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #138
llsf wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm. 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…

I don't know that there is much technology to sell, palm vein imaging is decades old in the access control industry. The reason you don't see it anywhere is because it was already a commercial failure in that application, by the end of the 1990s. 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 biometri…

Out of curiosity, why did it fail in that market?

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#149

Post by baby_souffle »

llsf wrote: post #124
toephu2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem was it solving though? NFC contactless payments is already pretty fast and convenient. I feel like Amazon One Palm was invented to solve for a problem we didn't really have. Thus the failure.

The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm. 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…

> The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.

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.

Re: Amazon One palm authentication discontinued

#150

Post by baby_souffle »

burnte wrote: post #111
cmiles8 wrote: post #77

The tech here was good but the product implementation was terrible. These scanners just showed up randomly in places and just sat there unused. I literally both saw them all over and never actually saw anyone use it. No clear onboarding pathway, no explanation as to what it did or why use it, no clarity on what happens to the data. Just a box sitting there. It was as if all the focus was on the tech and nobody bother…

I saw them show up without explanation, but I don't think that's the reason they were unused. If you look at it, it says what it is and to just hold your hand over it to use it, so it's very easy to learn to use and enroll. 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,…

> 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.

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

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