Info harvesting by big corporations will soon include all of your biometric data.
Starbucks has launched a trial of Amazon’s 'palm payment' system Amazon One in Seattle, the home of it's brand. The coffee chain has already tried Amazon Go at other stores built in partnership with Amazon in New York City.
Amazon already have thousands of pages of data on every customer and already use machine learning to predict what customers will want next based on that huge amount of data. They already know everything about you, based not only on your shopping habits but on your internet browsing which they also harvest from your phone and laptop. Now Starbucks have partnered with Amazon to extract your biometric data as well.
The new trial will take place in a waterfront community north of Seattle called Edmonds. Starbucks appears to be testing if older people, who tech media claim are more resistant to new technologies, but are more likely aware of the consequences of giving up their privacy in this way.
Trade magazine The Spoon said of the trial 'Reception of the technology has been mixed, with attendants reporting that older people are more skeptical of the technology.'
“They’re kind of freaked out by it,” an in-store attendant told Forbes. “It’s an older town, so some people aren’t interested.”
Starbucks is not yet forcing people to use Amazon One. Other payment options are still available at present, but this is the direction retail is going. Those interested in using the system are required to register their palm at an in-store kiosk. From there they can use the contactless payment system at stores with Amazon One. However, at the kiosk there is no warning about how potentially dangerous the technology could be.
The system uses a palm print, but if you swapped palm print for fingerprint and then told customers that their fingerprint would be taken and compared against a database every time they bought a coffee, it would sound unbelievable and utterly dystopian. But that is effectively what they are doing. All to make buying a latte more 'convenient'.
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