Amazon is once again in the spotlight over privacy, with lawmakers wanting to know what the company plans to do with customer palm prints.
Amazon rolled out palm print biometric scanning as a way for customers to pay without having to use their card. The technology is already in use in Amazon Go, Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star stores, as well as some Whole Food locations.
Lawmakers are concerned about the company’s plans, according to TechCrunch, writing a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to express those concerns. In particular, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) questioned whether Amazon would use the biometric data in its advertising business.
“Amazon’s expansion of biometric data collection through Amazon One raises serious questions about Amazon’s plans for this data and its respect for user privacy, including about how Amazon may use the data for advertising and tracking purposes,” the Senators wrote.
Amazon already has access to a wealth of information from their e-commerce operations and cloud business. It’s easy to see why there would be concern about them also having access to biometric data, especially if they plan to use it for anything other than a convenience service for their customers.
Amazon 4-Star is Amazon’s first retail store focused on selling Amazon’s products. The first of presumably many stores just opened in the Soho area of New York City and of course has made a big splash in the media. But what’s special about this store and what makes it a unique shopping experience?
Amazon Physical Stores VP Cameron Janes answers that question in a Bloomberg interview:
Amazon 4-Star is Built Around What Our Customers Our Loving
What is uniquely different is that we really built this store around our customers. It’s a direct reflection of our customers, not just what they’re buying, but really what they’re loving.
Everything in the store is rated 4 star or above by our customers, is a top seller or is the newest trending on Amazon.com. Our goal is that customers can walk into this store and pick up anything and know that it is going to be a great product because customers online have already said so.
The average rating of products in this store is 4.4 stars and collectively we have about 1,800 products in the store and they earned 1.8 million 5 star reviews. These are really high-quality products that our customers love. The product with the most customer reviews in Amazon 4-Star is actually the Fire TV Stick with Alexa voice remote with over 197,000 customer reviews and it’s rated 4.4 stars.
Curation is What 4-Star is About
Whenever your working offline you can’t have the endless aisle that you have online. When you are working offline you really have to curate and that’s actually what Amazon 4 star is all about. We have a highly curated selection from some of the top categories, the most popular categories on Amazon.com. We’ve got devices, electronics, kitchen, toys, home, and all of these hit that 4-star selection bar that we think is so important.
Here at 4-Star what we are trying to do is create an experience where customers can come in, browse, have fun shopping find products they love. With all of these experiences, we are trying to find more ways to connect with our customers. Of course, customers love to shop online, but a lot of customers love to shop offline as well. What we can do with these experiences is create a new type of shopping experiences and help them discover new products.
Our Focus is Connecting With Customers
Another thing you can do in offline that you can’t do online is that customers can come in and touch the products themselves. Certainly, with our device category, customers can come in the store, play with the Fire TV, they can read on the Kindle, they can interact with the Amazon Echo and Alexa products and see how those products work in first person and make a more confident buying decision.
Our focus here is on connecting with customers and if customers come in here and discover products that they love, we know they will come back and over time that can be something big. That’s really what we are focused on today.
