Walmart expands its drone-delivery service to reach 4 million households | Hacker News Reader

Walmart expands its drone-delivery service to reach 4 million households

cnbc.com

16 pointspaulkrush10 comments

The title of the post is editorialized ("Walmart delivery drones selling photo surveillance service"), perhaps misleadingly.

The actual article title is "Walmart expands its drone-delivery service to reach 4 million households" and this is the relevant section:

> Walmart will use the drones to make money in another way, too. It said it plans to offset the cost of deliveries by selling photographs taken by drones to municipalities and local business, such as construction or real estate companies. The revenue will be split with the drone operator.

I wouldn't call selling selling drone photos of houses for sale to real estate agents a "photo surveillance service."

I would say it is downright misleading. It implies photos taken without permission that could be an invasion of privacy, when the article is clear that this is a separate service offered to customers who want photos taken of their site or property.

It doesn't say the surveillance footage would be only limited to people who wanted photos taken of their own property. The default is that they will sell it to whomever wants to buy it. So I think the title, though editorialized, holds up.

"Walmart will use the drones to make money in another way, too. It said it plans to offset the cost of deliveries by selling photographs taken by drones to municipalities and local business, such as construction or real estate companies. The revenue will be split with the drone operator."

-- sure - but you're still not supposed to editorialize titles on HN --

I wonder if Walmart has ever considered that they may have been "catfished" into this concept by Amazon?

There are way too many issues with this to list --- for example; wind and trees and rain and liability.

With human pilots in the loop, this never scales beyond a cute novelty.

I would think the business plan is to scale the telop pilot to drone ratio higher with autopilot functions.

"About 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of Walmart’s more than 4,700 stores."

Wow. Is that true of many other large businesses? Target? McDonalds?

It is really annoying to live within a mile or so of the ones in rural areas due to the light pollution. A realtor in my hometown said that several neighborhoods lost 5-10% of their value due to the 24/7 parking lot lights. I cannot imagine adding drone traffic into the mix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com