Amazon One FAQs

Amazon One is a fast, convenient, contactless way for consumers to use their palms to enter a building, identify themselves, and pay. The service is highly secure and uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person’s unique palm signature, which simplifies a range of tasks from payment to access.

Amazon One is very straightforward to use and takes less than a minute for consumers to enroll. They need to add a credit or debit card, scan their palm(s), and enter a mobile number at any Amazon One device to register. After that, each time they need to confirm their identity or pay, they’ll hold their palm above the device for about a second and then be on their way.

We selected palm recognition for a few important reasons. First, palm recognition is considered more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm. Second, it requires someone to make an intentional gesture by holding their palm over the device. And finally, it’s contactless, which we think consumers will appreciate, especially in current times. Ultimately, using a palm as a biometric identifier puts consumers in control of when and where they use the service.

Amazon One was purposefully designed with data security in mind. In addition to following industry best practices regarding encryption and access controls, we have also included physical hardware security measures that are built into each Amazon One device. We intentionally architected the Amazon One service to store all highly sensitive biometric data off-device in a highly secure, isolated, and purpose-built cloud storage environment. Additionally, access controls are enforced and audited on both the data repository and the key management system. This ensures that, once collected, biometric data is transient and never persists on a device. Palm data that is provided to Amazon One is stored separately from other Amazon consumer data.

We understand that how we protect consumer data might be top-of-mind for businesses. At Amazon, earning and maintaining consumer trust is very important. We take data security and privacy seriously, and any sensitive data is treated in accordance with our long-standing policies.

We have purposefully designed Amazon One so that consumers have full control over their data and must take intentional action to use the service. Potential customers can review our security and privacy practices, FAQs, and terms at the Amazon One website.