Amazon will pay you $10 in credit for your palm print biometrics | Hacker News Reader

Amazon will pay you $10 in credit for your palm print biometrics

techcrunch.com

26 pointsjdmark10 comments

Ten whole dollars. Wow, I'm just thinking of all the ways that I can spend that ten whole dollars.

Maybe they can offer even more money for other body part scans. Eight dollars for a scan of your teeth, four dollars for a scan of your genitalia, two dollars for a scan of your sphincter,

Amazon, you're wonderful, I love you.

> four dollars for a scan of your genitalia

Let me introduce you to a website called OnlyFans.com

Whether or not you trust these companies with your biometric information (I don't), this is a raw deal. Judging by how damaging it would be if your biometric information was stolen / weaponized against you, they'd have to offer me upwards of 6 figures for it at minimum.

Storing this in the cloud is an all-time bone head move.

You would think we barter and haggle for unproductive hours for the goods and services we need.

90% of what I buy at a store I walk in, grab what I need, go to self check out and swipe my credit card.

Our society has such a strange obsession with new technology that does exactly the same thing as old technology but with additional benefits for someone that isn't you.

This doesn't even read as sexy-futuristic for the sake of sexy-futuristic. Every major city metro with a contactless farecard does a better job of making it seamless and futuristic.

From a security standpoint, biometrics are ugly. You've gotta put a large fudge factor in everything to accomodate natural inconsistencies. Nobody wants to see "come back and try to purchase after the blister heals". But that means there's a wide range to build mocks that fool the scanner. And, of course, once the biometric signature is leaked, you can't exactly change it on your next login.

In a way, the obsession with biometric payment feels dystopic. I wonder if the real dystopic angle is that biometrics undermine "consumer spoofing". Tying every transaction to a physical body, rather than a card number, probably exposes new profiling data at the sub-household level.

It is impossible to get the same palm print every time, so what they are storing are probably a fingerprint (ahah) of specific points of interest in a palm print. Still scary, though.

My credit union uses a palm biometric scanner like that to log into their new ATMs.

It works pretty good.

Does it provide anything an ancient ATM doesn’t?

Clout.

Security. Or a cut off hand?

The cut off hand doesn't work. The scanner sees the blood moving through your veins the same way a smartwatch can read your pulse.

You'd have better luck making a silicone replica and pumping fake blood through it. Maybe you could use infrared LEDs to simulate the changing image too... (Is there some simple way to make an infrared projector? Anyway stealing your palm image is as easy as it is for the ATM to read it.)

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