Amazon Patents Creepy Drone Technology To Spy On Your Home
Amazon Patents Creepy Drone Technology To Spy On Your
Home
by Tyler Durden Fri, 06/21/2019 - 15:05
According to a new patent awarded to Amazon on June 4 by
the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), an unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) could "perform a surveillance action" over the home of
an Amazon customer. It's being dubbed as "surveillance as a service,"
is a disturbing reminder that corporate America not only wants to monitor your
search trends and social media posts but now wants to monitor the outside of
your home.
A network of delivery drones would film Amazon customers'
homes from the skies while on their way to delivering packages. Artificial
intelligence will observe the property for anything unusual during the flyover,
such as broken windows, doors left open, and unauthorized people on the
property. Customers can request security flyovers hourly, daily, or weekly, the
patent said.
The patent explained, depending on the drone design and
its sensors, still images, video, infrared, night vision, audio, and or
real-time could be multiple monitoring types under the new service.
Earlier this month, Amazon unveiled a new delivery drone
that can fly vertically, like a helicopter, and horizontally, like an airplane
for long travels. The company could be launching a drone delivery service in
"the coming months."
Using delivery drones for surveillance purposes raises
enormous privacy concerns for non-Amazon customers who haven't consented to the
surveillance. The patent describes how geo-fencing could solve the privacy
issue and allows the drone to capture footage of homes only owned by customers.
We have reported on numerous Amazon drone patents over
the last several years, and it remains to be seen which of these inventions get
incorporated into a drone.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently
approved Amazon for commercial drone flights in rural regions of the country.
Amazon dove fairly deep into the home security industry
in February 2018 with the acquisition of Ring, the company that makes the
"smart doorbell." By the summer of 2018, Amazon launched
Neighbors" as a crime reporting social network that allows users to upload
Ring video of suspicious activity.
Delivery drones monitoring customers' homes seems like a
wonderful idea in the modern world, but Amazon will figure out how to abuse
privacy rights like it did when employees were spying on Alexa conversations
several months back.
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