An Amazon-branded palm scanner greeted me at my last doctor’s office visit a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what I’d call the experience. Unnerving? Orwellian?

Amazon One is a relatively new service from Amazon that lets businesses verify your identity after you wave your hand over a sensor. The technology first rolled out in the short-lived Amazon Go convenience stores in 2020 and is now a way to pay for groceries at Whole Foods. It’s also used for payment and age verification at a few sports and entertainment venues, including at Coors Field in Denver. And as of March, you can also scan your palm with Amazon One to check in at NYU Langone Health locations, which is where I encountered it. So far, you won’t be forced to scan your palm to get a beer at a Rockies game or see an NYU doctor, but it’s an option.

In addition to its experiments in public venues, Amazon One is marketing its scanners as an alternative to the fobs and codes that let employees into their office buildings. Amazon is also working with hotel companies and manufacturers that make security doors and safety deposit boxes to incorporate its palm scanner.

Biometric scanning refers to the process of capturing your unique physical characteristics in order to confirm your identity. Whether it’s your palm, your fingerprint, your eyeball, or your face, the concept can feel creepy or invasive to some. Biometric scanning can happen without your consent, as was the case with Clearview AI, the company that built a massive facial recognition database from billions of publicly available photos online. There’s also a permanence to the collection of biometric data. Once a company has the details of your face, you don’t have much control over how that data is used. After all, you can’t easily go out and get a new face.

Something seems fundamentally threatening about a future in which big tech companies use biometrics to serve as the gatekeepers of our digital identities.

Millions of people volunteer their faces or fingerprints, nevertheless, as a quick and convenient way to verify their identities and make life a little easier. With

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