Amazon One app now enables palm payment with a photo

Feel weird about giving your fingerprints to Amazon? 

Well, the company is making it easier to sign up for its palm recognition service known as Amazon One, which enables its users to pay by waving their palm over an Amazon One device at one of their brick-and-mortar locations. 

The barrier to entry was just lowered with the announcement that Amazon is enabling customers to sign up through the Amazon One app. Customers with the app can upload images of their palms, connect it to a credit card or other payment method, and they are ready to use the app. 

Prior to the release of the service, customers had to sign up for Amazon One at one of the company’s brick-and-mortar locations.

Amazon One is currently available at Amazon’s 500-plus Whole Foods locations and several of its Amazon Fresh locations, the company said. Customers can also use the service at over 150 third-party locations such as airports, sports stadiums, fitness centers, and more.

Amazon said in a press release on Thursday that the Amazon One palm service has already been used more than 8 million times. 

“Amazon One looks at both your palm and its underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical, vector representation — called a palm signature — for identity matching,” the company said. “To ensure Amazon One continues to deliver the same accuracy, our new AI innovation compares vector representations of palm images from the Amazon One app with the vector representation of palm and vein images from an Amazon One device.”