© Reuters/Brendan McDermid
Amazon has filed a patent for
delivery drones that also surveil customers - for their own good, it claims, suggesting that a drone will inform people if there's a fire or damage on their property
but won't snoop around.Users who consent to the surveillance get a helpful eye in the sky to
spot if they've left the garage door open, or if someone's broken their window, or if burglars are walking off with all their newly delivered Amazon goodies (the latter isn't mentioned in the
patent filing, but would presumably fall within its purview).
Users could even subscribe to the surveillance service as a high-tech alarm system, hiring their own airborne Big Brother to do daily
perimeter sweeps while they're on vacation, or check up on the kids while they're at work.Amazon claims its drones can be stopped from spying on non-consenting neighbors through geo-fencing, noting that
"any image or data the drone captures outside the geo-fence would be obscured or removed," but it stops short of explaining the mechanics of that removal. It doesn't explain whether the obscuring would be reversible, or whether the original unobscured images - like the millions of hours of Alexa background recording supposedly never archived but actually heard by thousands of humans - are actually
saved somewhere, however temporarily, where they can be examined by a human or AI.
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