Big Tech is getting challenged by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe, but that hasn’t stopped Amazon from devising creative ways to reach into pocketbooks.
This time, the world’s largest e-commerce company is heading straight for your hands.
It’s testing a system using scanners and hands geometry, a biometric-based software program similar to facial recognition, as a means for making purchases quickly, easily and profitably.
Trial by Vending Machine
Amazon is running the trialOpens a new window on its employee vending machines at its New York offices, and if the pilot works, selected Whole Foods markets will then test it on customers. If that test goes well, Amazon will adapt the hand-geometry technology for the company’s 500-store, artificial-intelligence-fueled grocery empire.
To use hand geometry, the process seems simple. As an Amazon Prime customer, you would go into a Whole Foods store, identify yourself, present a credit card , and then place your hands under a scanner.
Miroslav Baca, a University of Zagreb professor in biometrics, explained the technologyOpens a new window in a whitepaper: You place your hand on a semi-transparent base, and an image is captured by a digital camera. The image measures the thickness and size of your hand as well as its unique finger-to-hand size dimensions.
The image then is broken up into small, curved pieces displaying a segment of the hand. The system reassembles the curves to represent the hand’s exact shape, measurements and characteristics, and then stores your hand’s features, or geometry, in an identification database.
An Impressive Convenience
The advantage of using hand geometry is the convenience for both retailer and shopper. Once your hands are stored in a system, it’s an easy, money-free way to encourage you to make one or, hopefully, multiple purchases, literally with the wave of the hand.
Amazon is calculating that the system’s user-friendly ease will result in a major financial payoff for its Austin-based grocery subsidiary. Retailers have long been interested in faster checkout lines. And they theorize, perhaps correctly, that you tend to spend more when you don’t have the experience of actually touching something tangible like money.
Amazon estimates it could reduce the check-out time from the 3-to-4 second period of running a credit card to less than 300 milliseconds – once you reach the front of the line. Running the hand geometry technology itself is considered to be more user-friendly than eye or thumbprint recognition, and does not require much memory space.
Coming to a Store Near You?
Amazon plans to roll out the new technology by the beginning of 2020. Until then, it’s focusing on increasing its accuracy from its current one ten-thousandth of 1% to one millionth of 1% before being deployed.
But there are complications. Unlike eye or fingerprint recognition technologies, hands can actually change over time as a person ages and gains or loses weight. Life changes would require system updates from time to time, similar to providing new credit card details.
Privacy concernsOpens a new window  about a hand geometry system have been raised. And as the beat of cyber hacks goes on and on, there’s a new danger you need to recognize.
A Big Problem
It’s fairly easy to report a stolen credit card and order a new one. But the problem with a hand geometry payment system is that if a hacker breaches the system’s database and steals handprints, those details cannot simply be changed as with the loss of a credit card. The victim is stuck with a stolen ID and its potential financial consequences.
Finally, there’s the question of whether shoppers would be willing to use physical characteristics as identification for purchases. It’s a gamble that Amazon believes they’re more likely to take when hands rather than face are used for ID.
“Amazon probably made a judgment call that people will not want to pay with their face, but it’s fine to pay with their their hand,†technology researcher Stephanie Hare saidOpens a new window , adding: “That feels less like a mug shot.â€