Amazon Expands Contactless ‘Palm’ Technology During Pandemic

By Fiona Tang

Amazon.com is opening new physical retail stores so customers can make purchases by scanning their palms, a step that researchers said capitalized on consumers’ concerns about hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The technology, called Amazon One, debuted in September at an Amazon Go store in Seattle. Officials touted the technology as welcomed during the pandemic but declined to comment further to Digital Privacy News.

It uses a “biometric identification system” that includes a hand scanner that can identify a customer based on such characteristics as “lines and creases in the user’s palm, veins, bones, soft tissue or other structures beneath the epidermis of the skin,” according to a patent Amazon filed in December 2019.

To sign up for Amazon One, a customer inserts a credit card and positions their palm above the scanner. The scanner then generates a “unique palm signature” and connects the customer’s card information to their palm.

Retailers Balance Privacy While Foiling Thieves as COVID-Related Crime Rises

An alleged shoplifter caught on surveillance video at the Homestyles Gallery craft mall in North Carolina before Christmas. The video was posted to social media. Credit: Homestyles Gallery

By Joanne Cleaver 

Angie Smith noticed the red-haired woman who meandered into Homestyles Gallery, an accessories and craft mall in suburban Charlotte, N.C., days before Christmas.

But busy with customers, Smith didn’t realize until hours later that the woman had sashayed out with $700 in handcrafted jewelry from an artisan’s booth within the store. 

The incident was caught on surveillance tape: The COVID-masked woman glancing around, opening a glass case, sweeping jewelry into a tote bag and trotting off-screen. 

“We’ve had small losses before but nothing like this,” Smith, the mall’s co-owner, told Digital Privacy News. 

Infuriated at the woman’s brazen theft, she posted a clip of the video to the shop’s Facebook page — touching off a minor storm of citizen detectives determined to help a popular local business recover from a petty crime.

By Nora Macaluso

A recent federal court ruling allowing U.S. Border Patrol agents to search travelers’ cellphones and laptops at will has privacy advocates worried about a civil rights rollback.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston found in February that warrantless searches did not violate the U.S. Constitution.

The court, in reversing a 2019 decision, said the “volume” of travelers crossing U.S. borders made warrantless searches “essential” to border protection.

Requiring warrants would “hamstring the agencies’ efforts to prevent border-related crime and protect this country from national security threats,” the court said in its Feb. 9 decision.

By Robert Bateman

Apple Inc. faces an investigation by the French privacy regulator after a coalition of French startups alleged that the company was violating EU data-protection law.

France Digitale, an advocacy group comprising nearly 2,000 French businesses, contend that Apple tracked user behavior on iPhones and iPads by default, violating EU privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect in 2018.

Apple officials retorted that the group’s allegations, filed in a March 8 complaint to the Commission Nationale de l’informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), as “patently false.”

Edward Snowden speaks Tuesday at the Priv8 Virtual Summit on Digital Privacy. Credit: Orchid Labs Inc.

By Jackson Chen

Governments and companies must rethink how they use personal data amid surging consumer demand for better privacy protections, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden and other global digital-privacy experts said this week.

“Privacy is what protects that right of inquiry that leads to progress,” Snowden, 37, who has been living in political asylum in Russia since August 2013, told Tuesday’s opening session of the “Priv8 Virtual Summit on Digital Privacy,” sponsored by Orchid Labs Inc.

“Privacy was never about something to hide,” he continued. “Privacy is about something to protect.

“Privacy is the right to self. It allows you to be different and distinct from the majority.”

By Joanne Cleaver

When the IRS calls, taxpayers must answer.

But even with new tools the Internal Revenue Service has introduced to try to secure digital communication, taxpayers still must guard their data and access information, so they don’t make themselves targets for privacy intrusions, experts told Digital Privacy News. 

Largely in response to COVID-19 chaos intersecting with the possibility of fraud, the agency has created what it describes as a “secure” portal where taxpayers can view the information that it has on file for them. 

If you use the site, however, don’t let your guard down, said Ronald Semaria, a former IRS agent and fraud consultant and investigator in Brooklyn, N.Y. 

“There is no one foolproof site,” he told Digital Privacy News. “By the time someone makes up a program to protect you, somebody else is doing something to unprotect you.”

By Aishwarya Jagani

As governments and airlines worldwide prepare to issue “vaccine passports” — digital details of a person’s COVID-19 immunization status — privacy advocates are concerned over the security and privacy risks the documents pose. 

“Any information shared digitally is at risk of being leaked,” Alexis Hancock, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Digital Privacy News. 

“And without good digital-privacy law internationally, this information can become easily associated with the rest of a person’s data without their knowledge and informed consent.”

Critics expressed fears that these digital passes could put sensitive medical and health data in the hands of authorities and law enforcement, endangering the privacy of millions of citizens.

By Robert Bateman

Facebook recently claimed it had achieved a “paradigm shift” in AI development after training its algorithm on a billion Instagram photos.

But experts in privacy and AI ethics told Digital Privacy News that they were concerned about Facebook’s lack of transparency and proper risk assessment.

Facebook’s SEER (self-supervised) AI can correctly identify images 84.2% of the time after processing one billion “random, public, and non-EU images from Instagram,” according to a March 5 research paper released by company.

While most AI development relies on using labeled images to help algorithms distinguish among objects, self-supervised AIs are trained on unlabeled images.