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Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

blog.aboutamazon.com

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Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#22

Post by poisonborz »

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.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#23

Post by prima-facie »

plumeria wrote: post #21

Will this service have a "forget me" button? I think this should be the first question addressed in their FAQ.

Under the GDPR in EU or the DPA2018 in the UK you can request your data to be erased, corrected or you can grant limited access to your data.

You also have the right to request that a decision to not be made solely using automated means. This is a good introductory article

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/how-do-i-make...

Too bad most of these companies operate based on the US legislation which doesn't grant the same consumer rights.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#25

Post by solatic »

neilalexander wrote: post #3

> We selected palm recognition for a few important reasons. One reason was that 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. > When you hold your palm over the Amazon One device, the technology evaluates multiple aspects of your palm. No two palms are alike, so we analyze all these aspects with our vi…

They're being intentionally vague. Their argument is that they're only mapping from palm to credit card number and mobile phone number, which isn't the same thing as mapping from palm to real identity name (unless you also link to your Amazon account). Which belies the fact that it's much easier to map from a credit card number or mobile phone number to a real identity name.

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#28

Post by immmmmm »

Researcher in biometrics working on contactless palm/finger recognition here.

1) A new innovation ok. People have been doing that for more than a decade, my group included.

2) Given the sensors look, it's almost certainly near infrared (NIR) camera, probably 850nm illumination and the dark surface is a NIR filter.

3) It certainly capture a mix between palm veins (850nm quite absorbed by de-oxygenated hemoglobin) and palm skin ridges.

"Rather, the images are encrypted and sent to a highly secure area we custom-built in the cloud where we create your palm signature."

4) Weird approach to biometric template security to send palm picture to a server...

5) Curious how anti-spoofing is implemented, if at all.

edit: less agressive

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#29

Post by toper-centage »

systemvoltage wrote: post #11

Year 2030. I kind of like the old school physical credit cards. It was fun to carry a wallet too. You could customize it, add a bit of flair and constantly obsess about making it thin. Good ol’ days.

Yeah, but that's just simply inconvenient. When you look at a copyrighted building or hear a copyrighted song, you need a quick and integrated way to debit the royalties from your crypto wallet. How did folks do that in 2020? Did you have to enter your credit card details in hundreds of websites before leaving the house each day?

Re: Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go

#30

Post by nafizh »

'One reason was that 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.'

Umm, if this is true, how are you identifying the person then?

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