Are You Willing To give Amazon Biometric Data?
Are you willing to give Amazon biometric data in order to avoid having to scan a barcode in an Amazon app?
That is the bet that Amazon is making with its "Amazon One" - that consumers will opt for convenience over privacy. Look, for its own stores, that's one thing. At its stores, Amazon knows who you are - unless you want to pay with cash - when you walk in the door.
The big question is - similar to Amazon payments - do retailers, offices, and others want Amazon to be the gatekeeper of identity in America?
I feel like some time in the past 5-10 years we passed over the time where Amazon's innovation outshone any potential competitive, privacy, or even general creepiness and "all eggs one basket" implications.
To be fair, these concerns aren't new. At the apex of Microsoft's power, it could roll out the same technology as a competitor and it would not be accepted simply because it would become the default if it were, and as a result it was quickly rejected by consumers. Ideas from Bill Gates like avatars, intelligent assistants, and universal inbox come to mind. Great ideas. Wrong company.
So the question for the industry is - is it the idea, the company, or both that would be wrong with this kind of situation?
There was a lot of skepticism in the comments section. For instance, Sujay Shetty is not personally on board with the idea, but zeroed in exactly on why it just might be widely adopted. “…a lot of convenience over privacy decisions are made by consumers/users who are uninformed on how their data is being collected, analyzed, and used - and the actual privacy trade-off is oftentimes well abstracted (so they aren't really thinking about it).”
Exactly. Tech companies are preying on this - it’s the same premise that assumes most people don’t read the privacy policy/terms of service and just scroll to the bottom and click “next.”
Rhett Ullmann seems unbothered and sees “…no issue with it. Convenience is king. I already fly Global Entry, so if palm/fingerprint scanning was a real dilemma, I jumped ship a while ago. Amazon has positioned themselves as the top name in retail, so the same concept of "1 click" purchasing being applied to real life would largely be beneficial. Sometimes, the name matters.”
Sometimes the name matters.
