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Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

Did you even watch the video? It specifically addresses the noise pollution question, and is one of their very significant engineering feats. Obviously, it is yet to be proven at scale, but if it works as the vision and developments so far indicate, it would be a net reduction in noise pollution compared to our current infrastructure which executes these deliveries.

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It's not just noise pollution, it's visual pollution as well. Pretty soon they'll attach little advertisements to them and cameras and when they fly by your window as your enjoying your morning cup of coffee it'll ID you and slow down a little, track your eyes, make sure you see that Amazon or Costco sells coffee for $14, give you a score, send you an email, and send you a flyer in the mail. They'll know when your backyard is in need of watering, and maybe they'll even see that your garden isn't doing so well and send you ads for fertilizer or alert local gardening companies to stop by and talk about how whatever is really harming your tomatoes and they've got just the solution.

Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.

Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.

This kind of seems like a sci-fi scenario, not something that is likely to happen.

If lawn-care companies wanted to do targeted advertising based on how your lawn is looking, they can already use satellite imagery for that. They don't need drone cameras.

These drones also aren't going to fly by your window. They fly above the height of houses, trees, etc. - and they are too small ads you could see from that height

The satellite imagery will either be too expensive or too out of date. Also lawn care is just one aspect. These drone platforms will have real time data, Amazon will sell it - there's little doubt about that unless there's a regulatory reason. Insurance, live police monitoring, product purchase/usage, snapshots of the inside of your house through the window. All of that, and more, is on the table.

Delivery drones (which is part of the topic at hand) will absolutely fly by my window, otherwise how will they deliver the packages? Flying above my house still means I see the drones from my window.

Ads? Just beam images down or in the sky. Airplanes do this now during big sporting events and such. Buy a car! So and so are getting married! Etc.

Oh I can see it now. Coordinated drone ads where they'll fly over the sky and let me know it's Black Friday Only at Wal-Mart or I can get the best deal on a new Samsung OLED Smart TV now by scanning the drone QR code with my mobile phone!

It's not sci-fi, it's happening today. Go to an Amazon Fresh store and look around - they have literally hundreds of cameras, and several cameras pointing at every single section of shelving. They are tracking your behaviors, how long you stand in a particular place, how you walk around the store, when you touch items, when you put items back, how long you look at an item, whether you're likely reading the label, the list goes on.

Companies have also had, for like a decade now, advertisements in places like malls with cameras to track engagement and how often people look at it and what number of people look at it.

Amazon Fresh also started sending me flyers in the mail after I visited a single time. I get them multiple times a week.

I don't like that either, but it has nothing to do with drone delivery.

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