What Whole Food’s Palm-Scanning Payment Means For The Future

Amazon announced the addition of 65 new Whole Foods locations to its Amazon One contactless payment platform on August 9, as reported by Supermarket News. This announcement came on the same day that the registration and checkout systems activated in Whole Foods locations across the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas. Since 2021, Amazon has rolled such systems out to Whole Foods locations in Austin, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Signing up for the Amazon One service is as easy as approaching any of the kiosks, holding your hand over the scanner, and then inserting your credit card and inputting your phone number. It sounds like you may need to activate your Amazon One account for each new store you visit, which only involves inserting your credit card once per store.

While it’s exciting for contactless shopping to make a splash during the COVID-19 pandemic era, it’s reasonable to be concerned that unmitigated access to biometric data could be abused, given Amazon hasn’t kept itself safe from controversy surrounding its treatment of privacy. For instance, the company has come under fire regarding its Ring camera, a static security camera that also acts as a doorbell. Amazon has openly cooperated with over 2,000 law enforcement parties who can supposedly request to see anything that may or may not have been recorded by the camera, and this has ignited concerns about civil rights in an Amazon-dominated market.