Amazon launched its biometric authentication payment system, Amazon One, about three years ago. It has already been tested in some stores in California and is currently available in over 200 stores across 20 states. On July 21, the company announced plans to make this system available by the end of the year in all of the more than 500 Whole Foods Market locations nationwide—Whole Foods being the grocery chain it acquired in 2017.
Amazon One works by registering a customer’s palm data and linking it to their account and credit card information, allowing customers to simply hover their palm over an in-store scanner to complete a payment. Customers who wish to use this payment method must first register with Amazon One, providing their palm data along with their mobile phone number and credit or debit card information. Registration can be done at Amazon Go or Whole Foods stores, and Amazon claims that the entire process takes less than a minute.
While Apple has already implemented facial recognition on the iPhone, biometric authentication such as Amazon’s palm recognition is already becoming mainstream overseas. In India, for example, the Aadhaar system—a biometric authentication system that combines fingerprint, facial, and iris recognition—is widely used as the national ID system.
As biometric authentication becomes the norm globally, Japan, which is struggling with personal authentication via the My Number Card, seems woefully outdated. Incidentally, the multi-modal biometric authentication used in Aadhaar employs technology developed by Japan’s NEC. It is rather ironic that, despite possessing advanced individual technologies, Japan has been unable to harness them to build a modern digital infrastructure at home.