Whole Foods is getting into palm reading, and yes — the idea is to separate you from your money as quickly as possible.
The upscale grocer said Wednesday that its parent company Amazon’s palm-scanning technology for accepting customer payments in checkout lines will soon debut at a supermarket in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The rollout confirms an exclusive report by The Post in September 2019, which first revealed that Amazon was planning to roll out the controversial technology. It has since rolled out to about a dozen of the high-tech Amazon Go convenience stores.
The system uses Amazon One technology, which employs high-tech imaging and algorithms to create and detect a “unique palm signature” based on the ridges, lines and veins in each person’s hand as they place their palm over a scanning device.
The first time shoppers use the scanner, they must insert a credit card to link it with their palm print. After that, they can pay simply by holding their hand over the scanner.
Its high-tech sensors don’t require users to touch the scanning surface, like Apple’s fingerprint technology does.
Instead, palm-reading tech uses computer vision and depth geometry to process and identify the shape and size of each hand they scan before charging a credit card on file.
The company said that the palm-scanning tech will be offered as just one of many payment options at participating Whole Foods Stores and that it won’t impact store employees’ job responsibilities.
“At Whole Foods Market, we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to improve the shopping experience for our customers,” said Arun Rajan, senior vice president of technology and chief technology officer at Whole Foods Market.
Source: Nypost
