Wrist and Hand Scanning Payment Violates User Privacy and Should Not Be Implemented

Remember the days when contactless pay didn’t exist? When you physically had to put your bank card into a debit machine and key in your pin number in order to be approved for a payment? Yes, those days seem so far away, but if you really think about it, it was not that long ago.

Technology is great and it’s constantly changing. While I do love it, some of the changes are just a little too much, like using wrist scans for payment, an experiment being rolled out by Apple and Amazon. That’s right, they are planning to save human “wrist prints” so that they can be used to authenticate and complete purchases and transactions. 

The idea is that, in addition to tapping your phone, Apple watch, or bank card to pay, you can scan your hand or wrist at the checkout. 

I’m baffled at the fact that this is something that is actually being considered. It’s a total security concern and I cannot get on board with it. 

According to the New York Post, “the system, code-named ‘Orville,’ will allow customers with Amazon Prime accounts to scan their hands at the store and link them to their credit or debit cards.”

This sounds like a huge privacy and safety issue to me, and although Apple has not revealed much about the “wrist print” payment method, I imagine it to be something along the lines of barcodes, but on your skin. Bank details are very private, and in the age of countless technologies and constantly evolving viruses, this is not something that I would be open to sharing with Amazon. 

With that problem already out in the air, I really do not see why companies want to create these payment methods, nor do I see why consumers would want to use them. In all honesty, there isn’t much more to gain from a “wrist scan” that enables faster checkout. You’ll still need to wait in a line because the customer in front of you might have a huge cart of things to checkout. The “wrist print” just makes it faster for you to spend your hard earned money. 

The technological world is changing fast, and not for the better. Privacy is slowing fading away, search engines know what you want to type in before you even finish the first word, and websites track you with cookies. It seems as though if you want to be a part of the digital world, you need to be open to giving up some private details to companies. 

I can definitely live without these new inventions that are created to make the digital world “better.” I like keeping my personal information to myself and I don’t have a problem with keying my pin code into a debit machine to achieve that goal.

Technology is great. I can vouch for that. I think we all can. However there is a point when we need to say, ‘Enough,” because at this rate, it just seems like the digital world is stockpiling our data and taking over our lives.