Restaurants

Advocacy group petitions Panera Bread to drop Amazon One

Image: Adobe Stock.

March 30, 2023

Fight for the Future, a nonprofit advocacy group that describes itself as dedicated to causes related to online privacy and censorship through the use of the Internet, has created a petition to persuade Panera Bread to cancel its contract with Amazon One. The petition claims Amazon One's palm scanners connect customer handprints with their payment information and loyalty account and ask them to pay with their palm instead of their credit card.

"It's pretty strange to live in a world where a sandwich shop is laundering the reputation of the corporate surveillance state, but I guess that's just where we're at," Anna Bonesteel, strategic responses manager for Fight for the Future, said in a press release. "Panera is cooking up a PR nightmare for themselves by installing biometric surveillance kiosks at their stores. This benefits no one except Amazon and their quest to track and surveil everyone's every purchase and move."

Panera Bread did not respond to a request for comment at the time of this report.

Amazon has stated in response to a recent lawsuit over biometric identification that only shoppers who choose to enroll in Amazon One and choose to be identified by hovering their palm over the device have their palm-biometric data securely collected, and such individuals are provided the proper privacy disclosures during the enrollment process.