Sources: Amazon is testing a biometric payment system that identifies and charges users by scanning their hand, with first Whole Foods deployments by next year
Forget the titanium Apple Card — Amazon's latest payment method uses flesh and blood. — The e-tailing giant's engineers …
New York PostNicolas Vega
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 report was the first public signal of what became Amazon's biometric checkout push: within months, sources had Amazon working with Visa on palm-payment checkout terminals, and by late 2020 the company formally unveiled Amazon One at two Seattle Go stores.
The Whole Foods deployment flagged here as a plan materialized on schedule — Amazon brought the palm readers into a Seattle Whole Foods in April 2021 with seven more stores to follow, and by 2023 the tech had spread to other retailers, stadiums, and ID-verification uses while drawing sustained privacy scrutiny.
First-order effects
Whole Foods shoppers become the first mainstream test population for hand-scanning checkout, swapping card taps for a biometric identifier tied to their payment credentials.
Visa's role in the terminal tests gives the card network an early seat in biometric rails that could otherwise route around it.
Second-order effects
Other grocery and convenience chains face pressure to match frictionless entry-and-pay experiences or cede the checkout-speed advantage to Amazon's physical footprint.
Biometric data collection at scale hands privacy advocates and regulators a concrete target beyond online tracking — palm geometry stored by a retailer becomes a new class of sensitive record.
Third-order effects
If palm-based identity proves out across Amazon's stores and third-party venues, payment credentialization shifts from something you carry to something you are, forcing card networks, banks, and lawmakers to define rules for biometric payment data.
Amazon's pattern of piloting infrastructure in its own retail footprint before licensing it outward positions the company as a potential B2B vendor of store technology, not just a retailer.
The trend: Retail payments are moving from cards toward biometric identity, with Amazon building the rail inside its own stores first and then selling it to other venues.
SCOOP: Amazon is quietly testing out biometric payment tech that it plans to roll out to Whole Foods stores by early next year. The project, codename “Orville” can scan your hand and process your transaction in less than 300 milliseconds https://nypost.com/...
People in 2019: we need enhanced online privacy, security and granular controls for everything related Amazon: ✨ scan your hand to pay ✨ https://nypost.com/... https://twitter.com/...
me: *rifling through a bag of severed human hands and getting more and more agitated as they get rejected* haha I don't know why these aren't working, I paid the bill, I swear, haha https://nypost.com/...
once these things get done, they become very hard to undo, and we haven't really had the chance to even have a conversation about whether or not this is the future we want https://twitter.com/...
There's a very real possibility OMNY will be dated technology before it's fully implemented, just like the Metrocard was with tap cards elsewhere. https://twitter.com/...
NEW: Amazon's engineers are quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase The system, code-named “Orville,” is similar to what countries with robust surveillance programs like China want https://nypost.com/...
This sounds like it started out nicknamed “Orwell” and then someone realized they should at least change a few letters before that got out https://twitter.com/...