Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/03/whole-foods-biometrics.html
Your hands are your ID. New payment system for Whole Foods being tested by Amazon now.
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There will never be a five finger discount at Whole Foods.
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Why? I can already pay with biometric authentication at Whole Foods using Apple Pay, but that way the biometric data is stored inside my phone and not accessible to Amazon. And I can complete the process while my items are still being scanned, so who cares if it takes a few seconds? Itās still not slowing down the checkout process.
Donāt tell me Iām going to have to start wearing gloves to the grocery store. (And I guess I should probably already be wearing a balaclava or something?)
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Whatās wrong with a credit card? Seems small enough to fit into my pocket. And if weād ever get off our duff and switch to chip+PIN itād be reasonably secure.
I must be an older generation. Iām way more likely to forget to bring my phone than forget to bring my wallet.
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Amazon testing āOrwellā biometric tech that scans your hands.
FTFY.
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Thatās been my experience too. Unfortunately, if one is a Prime Member, one really does have to remember to bring ones phone.
Amazon is rapidly becoming the Incarnation of Big Brother itself with this and all the bullshit surrounding police and itās ring system
Kind of makes you wonder if anyone in Congress cares about stopping the Privacy nightmare this is going to unleash
Oh yeah nevermind, I forgot Congress is inept, cruel, likes fucking us over because it hates the American people and doesnāt care about any of us
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This guy wonāt make the gradeā¦
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What was that Vonnegut novel where the woman who inherited a large corporation and signed documents with her thumb prints?
They pickled her thumbs.
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If this stuff keeps up I might just switch to paying for everything with a painstakingly calligraphed paper check.
āStop rushing me! See, you made me misspell the amount. Now Iāll have to start all over.ā
I actually wouldnāt, but Iād certainly think about it.
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Seems like the solution to this is just to pay in cash.
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Does it really matter if itās scanning your hands vs scanning your ever-present cyber-hivemind device? Weāre in deep with the monitored-at-every-moment cyber-dystopia at this point, no need to pretend that a hand-scanner is any worse than what weāve got. They can sequence your dna from a hair you leave behind, you are tracked constantly, every day, online and irl.
What-ever! Wake me up when the CME hits and it all goes kaput. 
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The next time I feel compelled to spend $265.00 on a weekās groceries, I will remember this and take my custom elsewhere.
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Stealing that gif, as it will come in handy for future use.
Thanks!
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It matters quite a lot. Biometrics canāt be changed (I canāt get a new hand when Amazonās servers get hacked and my hand measurements are put up for sale on āthe dark webā). Card numbers and passwords can.
With my device, I can choose whether to use biometrics or just a passcode, and if I use biometrics, theyāre stored only on a chip in my device, not on Amazonās servers. Amazon just gets my account number, which can be changed, and some one-off transaction details.
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Agreed.
Using oneās biometrics as a security measure is highly unwise, for a whole plethora of reasons.
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my solution has been to stop using whole foods entirely. i went to one of my favorite whole foods about two months after amazon took them over and the quality of the experience had declined so precipitously i was tempted to step outside the building just to make sure i was in the right store. it makes me very sad to witness what has happened to it because the very first whole foods opened up just a couple of miles from my auntās house and the store consisted mostly of bulk barrels and bins. they had some fantastic things. some of the first basmati rice i had seen anywhere, along with many other products that were inexpensive and relatively rare in the grocery business in texas in the period 1980-85.
my situation with respect to grocers is one of the few instances where being in texas is to my advantage because i can opt for an h.e.b. central market.
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Completely agree. People need to run away from that company pronto. Everything about what it thinks, believes, and acts upon is shit.
And I live in Seattle.
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Leaving aside that biometrics canāt be changed (for when that hand data inevitably gets released out into the wild), I wonder about accuracy. How distinct are human hands, really? Cameras capturing images of hands at some distance and unknown positions? The accuracy might be good, but it canāt be that good.
A false positive, where it misidentifies someone hand, and thatās all it need to start charging someone elseās credit card? Thatās really not going to be good.
And in real life:
Crap, that was 14 years agoā¦ (and all thatās happened since is theyāve realized they need to make some checks that the finger is still attached. And moved on to eyeballs and hands as identifiersā¦)
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