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Comment by notJim | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't you buy a regular lockbox for your condo that doesn't involve being constantly surveilled by Jeff Bezos?

We have lockboxes in my building in Japan. They’re just part of the infrastructure of a high-end condo here. You tap your key to get in the lobby door. A chime and recorded voice tells you that a package is waiting. You tap your key again inside and the locker with your stuff pops open. The lockers range in size from small to quite large boxes.

These work with any delivery carrier, but I’m not sure how the delivery person enters the apartment number.

If you walk around to the back side, which is generally exposed and doesn't need a key to get to, there should be a bunch of doors that are either unlocked or locked, and a keypad. I wondered the same thing myself about 7 years ago and, when I saw the Yamato guy, asked him to show me how he did it. :)

I moved out of an apartment building in the US which had a system similar to this. Ours had no empty doors on the back -- carriers had to use the same entry pads we did to deliver packages. Each carrier got a code which gave them access to the initial room, and entered the name/apt number of intended recipient.

Annoyingly, it was a subscription service with no other way of getting package delivery securely to the building.

The regular post boxes at my last apartments had some extra large common boxes. The letter carrier would put your package in one of them, and the key in your mailbox. Done, and no surveillance, tech, tech backdoors or batteries/power.

Who hands out the key to the letter carrier, a security guard?

Presumably each empty locker would have a key sitting in its lock - as you would see (for example) at the gym?

Yes, that.

Yes, but then how will the Amazon (or FedEx/UPS/etc) delivery person put the package inside? There’s a business idea here in connecting their handhelds to the Lockerbie and apps on customer phones.

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