Panera shouldn’t be in the surveillance business.
Everyone’s favorite bread-based chain recently announced that they are installing Amazon’s palm scanners in their stores. These devices connect your handprint with your payment info and loyalty account and ask you to pay with your palm instead of your credit card.
This is a terrible bargain for Panera customers. It’s not more convenient, and palm scanners invade our privacy and permanently hand over our sensitive biometric information to Amazon. Sign the petition to tell Panera: No biometrics for bread! Cancel your deal with Amazon One.
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Not convenient. Only frightening.
Panera says that palm scanning will make buying a bowl of soup “frictionless.” But that’s not really true. Palm scanning isn’t easier or faster than tapping a credit card. In fact, this process creates more friction by irrevocably linking your handprint with your identity and giving all that data to Amazon—a for-profit company that’s dying to track and surveil your every move.
By installing Amazon One palm scanners, Panera is showing it’s happy to prop up Amazon’s surveillance empire, and surveillance, especially biometric surveillance, makes us all less safe. When companies and governments scan and store data about our bodies, they have that data indefinitely. And unlike a credit card or an ID card, our faces, hands, and voices can’t be changed—meaning that biometric data can be used to identify and track us for the rest of our lives.
On top of that, Amazon One’s cloud-based storage system is vulnerable. Biometric data stored in databases far more sensitive than Amazon’s have been stolen by hackers. Amazon frequently collaborates with the police—it could give up your palm to the cops, ICE, or DHS, even without a warrant. To be blunt, palm scanning’s simply not worth it. Especially not for a sandwich.
Panera needs to pull the plug on this mistaken collab, just like Red Rocks before them. Sign the petition, then send a tweet to light up Panera support. No biometrics for bread!