Need a $10 credit? Just do a simple palm scan on Amazon’s new payment system

Last year, Amazon had announced a new payment system which uses a simple wave of the hand. The ecommerce giant launched Amazon One scanners that registers an image of a user’s palm, allowing them pay by hovering their hand in mid-air “for about a second or so”.

By February, this year, Amazon expanded its palm scanners to other grocery and book stores, a report by Tech Crunch said. Amazon has continued to expand its biometric scanning technology in several cities in US, including New York, Texas, New Jersey and Maryland.

According to Amazon, the palm scanning payment system captures all details of a user’s palm–both surface-area details as well as lines and veins pattern–to create palm signature.

The palm signature gets stored in the cloud and used to confirm the user’s identity when he/she is present in one of Amazon’s stores.

Amazon told Tech Crunch that it stores palm data indefinitely, unless one chooses to delete the data once there are no outstanding transactions left, or someone does not use the feature for two years.

Moreover, Amazon has promised to secure palm data using encryption, data isolation and dedicated secure zones with restricted access controls. It added that the palm data is used to improve its system and this data is “protected using multiple layers of security controls”.