Amazon testing 'Orville' biometric tech that scans your hands to pay at Whole Foods, stores will use it starting early 2020

[GulliverFoyle]

[Mindysan33]

@navarro

my solution has been to stop using whole foods entirely.

There’s that too! There are other organic options now where I live - Sprouts, both Kroger and Publix have organic choices, farmer’s markets, etc. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve been to a whole foods since Amazon bought them.

@Jim_Campbell

I’ve been to a couple places that said they didn’t take cash.

Me too. I’m finding this a worrying trend, honestly. The argument I’ve heard is that it cuts down on labor costs, as it’s quicker… I don’t personally buy that, though. You’re still having another company taking a cut of your profits, too, which probably evens out whatever you might save on the extra 30 seconds it takes to make change.

[Malarkey]

1. Has Seth MacFarlane been consulted?
   

2. We have to scan our palm to enter work. It doesn’t work for everyone. It especially doesn’t work for everyone when it’s cold outside.

[the_borderer]

@Shuck

(and all that’s happened since is they’ve realized they need to make some checks that the finger is still attached. And moved on to eyeballs and hands as identifiers…)

[Shuck]

@RickMycroft

At least with a password, you can opt-out when presented with the wrench method.

@the_borderer

I just recently saw some paper discussing possible methods for determining if an eye was still part of a living body or not, for an eye-scanner. I don’t know if we should be heartened that they’re thinking about this before someone gets their eye plucked out, or horrified that they haven’t already implemented such systems to prevent such a thing…

@LDoBe

put his hand on a scanner that took a photo of the back of his hand

They did say that it wouldn’t be necessary to put one’s hand on a scanner with this system. Which is what made me wonder how accurate it could be, as that would mean that the very shape of the hand, when simply held up to the camera, wouldn’t be consistent.

@LDoBe

now includes things like surface vein mapping (doable with the IR sensitivity of a lot of COTS cameras)

An interesting method of excluding dark-skinned customers from shopping at your store by making it impossible for them to use your payment system…

@LDoBe

occasionally would refuse him entry if he had a bruise or recently trimmed his nails

False negatives would also be very bad for a payment system. If even some small percent of your customers waste time waving their hand around and getting rejected, and then having to pull out a credit card (or, worse, being forced to leave with no groceries at all), the system doesn’t last long.

Up until fairly recently, my mother always paid by check when she bought something at a store. Every so often, the check-scanning system would have a fit that would take extra time to resolve. She finally got annoyed enough to use her chipped credit card (for the first time), and once she realized how easy that was, she never went back. If one is starting out using easy payment systems, the hand-scanning system has to be flawless to compete.

@gatto

3d print a version of someone’s hand

Presumably there’s enough sub-surface elements being detected that it wouldn’t work. At least, not easily… (but it’s certainly possible to print out a facsimile set of veins or bones in a fake hand)

[fuzzyfungus]

@LDoBe

My dad worked in a datacenter and in secured areas he had to badge in and put his hand on a scanner that took a photo of the back of his hand. It was quite secure and occasionally would refuse him entry if he had a bruise or recently trimmed his nails.

My school bought a hand-scanner device to secure the front door. Either they cheaped out or they got swindled by the vendor: people quickly realized that the surface you were supposed to put your hand on, palm down, got super gross; and also that apparently most people’s hands are sufficiently symmetrical that putting your other hand on the plate palm up provided an outline similar enough to be accepted.

I’ve no doubt that the state of the art is considerably better; but this one was not an impressive showing.

Also, they might have left the default vendor passwords unchanged on the control unit and not VLANed it off from the default data VLAN were all the PCs had free reign.

[NativeSpeaker]

Huh? Are you in defense? That’s probably the only place were I would deem this as acceptable.

[Malarkey]

Financial institution.

[NativeSpeaker]

Huh. Yeah, thank you but I’ll pass. It’s effin bad that I have to give fingerprints for a passport (and I dropped every country that requires me given them one), but any other biometric data I give stays on my devices and nowhere else.