Amazon Go

I wonder how they plan to deal with fraud... some kind of check-in process instead?

> With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

Yes, seems like you check-in with an app.

I saw that, but it sounds vague enough that there a few different scenarios I can think of to attack this service. Like what are they going to do if multiple people are sharing an account, but they only have photos of one?

edit: I just realized how they can deal with that -- take a picture when the person walks in and tie it to the account they scanned. There still seem to be a bunch of fraud issues, but this is certainly interesting.

I was thinking that, but then realized that the concept of fraud doesn't really apply in the way we're used to. I mean you're allowed to walk into the store, take anything you want, and then walk out.

How would you even define fraud in that context? Presumably there are things you could do to confuse or mislead the technology, but it seems to me that as presented the onus is on Amazon to just charge you the correct amount based on what you leave the store with.

In the video, the customers check in with a barcode displayed on the app.

Probably there will be a guard at the entrance: the barrier will beep when someone enters without signing in, and the guard will stop them.

What's more interesting is that there can be absolutely no dead angles for this to work.

They might have cameras inside each shelve, mounted on top, to correlate products taken with the person standing in front.

But what if two persons stand close together, one leans over and takes something...

Or what if you go into the store with a friend or your kids. And you all pick up items which are supposed to go on your tab.

It's definitely a challenging problem.

Presumably they'll want to deactivate the accounts for people who don't settle their bills, and they'll want to keep out folks who don't have accounts. This seems attackable to me, probably because they haven't released enough details about how it works.

Just don't share the account. That may already be part of their ToS.

Yes those two things are trivial though. Presumably the technological advance here is the ability to tell what a person has chosen and charge them for it without barcode scanning or checkout.

They don't need to remember photos at all. Just track the person beginning at the point of scan.

It should be easy to MITM victims of powned phones unless they pay extremely close care to ping times or RTT in general.

All I have to do is pown someone's phone and use an app on my phone to make my phone look like its their phone, regardless of where they actually are. I can't imagine the facial recognition would be that good.

Its a simple extension of physically stealing phones or cloning like people did in the 80s/90s on analog AMPS. cloning is interesting to think about, steal their amazon auth info, remotely brick their phone for good luck, walk in with a burner phone claiming to be their new phone, its all good.