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Comment by petersouth | Hacker News Reader

I think there's gonna be alot of teenage pranks and destruction. People setting the landing spot in the water or people stealing them with nets. Not sure if much recourse unless there camera footage or gps locator.

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This is the standard fear response to new technologies. Uber: how can you get in a car with a stranger? Airbnb: Even Paul Graham said "are you nuts?". Self driving cars: but what if people take advantage of it's collision avoidance abilities to walk in front? etc. etc. The fact is, most people are not malicious, life goes on anyway, and the risk of vandalism is quantifiable and included in the cost of doing business.

And in this case vandals can easily be prosecuted, since a drone is already hooked up with remote control, GPS tracking, cameras and monitoring.

I find a lot of the whole drone delivery thing pretty silly outside of some specific scenarios. Nonetheless, there is an equally silly "we must guarantee 100% reliability and security" thought." UPS does fine. They have no trouble leaving most packages at my door. They probably don't live the same thing at other doors. (Though I don't know their heuristics for such things.)

OTOH, I feel like if people today proposed that trucks leave unattended packages outside people's door, it would be dismissed as unworkable. But it happens constantly with minimal problems. There aren't as many bad people in the world as some people think.

I've got a 100% theft rate for unattended packages in the past 90 days.

Thank you captain anecdote.

The OP must not live in a city. Package theft is a cottage industry.

The drones are almost certainly going to have cameras (for object avoidance) and GPS on-board in order to satisfy regulators that Amazon knows where its drones are and that they're safe. Consider Amazon's own airspace proposals linked in the FAQ of the article.

No way. There will definitely be camera footage- multiple cameras on the drone getting multiple angles- and more importantly, from other drones.

Along with several GPS devices on each drone, each with redundant power supplies.

I think someone previously made the analogy of a lot of UPS trucks getting stolen. It could happen, but prosecution is probably a sufficient penalty to prevent it from being a serious issue.

Also easily fixed if the FCC makes messing with unmanned aircraft a felony.

Sort of how teenagers occasionally destroy people's mailboxes today? There are risks to everything and we got over it.

Yeah, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of drone hunting going on, until Amazon figures out a way to secure these things.

I think there's going to be a few very high profile prosecutions of drone vandals.

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