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Comment by whoopdedo | Hacker News Reader

A stressed out underpaid and overworked delivery driver is the last person I want in my garage. Verified deliveries are left at the wrong house, or the driver simply takes it with them after posting the porch picture. And I've seen boxes arrive that were forced open and the contents pulled out. But sure, it's the customers who are untrustworthy not the delivery people.

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> A stressed out underpaid and overworked delivery driver is the last person I want in my garage.

Same, but this is irrelevant to the point GP was making. Some minority of people do want Amazon Key (and similar services), and those people are now unable to claim their package wasn't delivered once they sign up for the service.

Add those people up and you have something worth millions, even if there aren't many of them.

I live in a townhouse and I _love_ the Key deliveries into my garage. I've been using it since it was a closed beta, and I haven't had a problem with it.

It provides a convenient service for both parties.

I fully suspect though that the people who do want Amazon Key and the people who are happily defrauding Amazon are not one and the same.

I realise that there are the porch pirates who are another issue entirely!

True. Delivery drivers consistently deliver to my neighbor instead of myself. The last three digits of our addresses are 885 and 855, and they consistently confuse the two. They’re tired, overworked, underpaid, and I honestly don’t blame them. But I wouldn’t trust anyone in my garage/home when I’m not home. Not sure why these companies think that will actually work.

In US homes the garage is often a way to access the house with minimal security between the two.

That’s not true, the garage typically has a full outdoor door with standard security (dead bolts, wired into the security system) the same as any other door as the interface door between the garage and the house. This is a code thing for a variety of reasons but primarily because the outdoor door is weatherized and provides a barrier against CO, but also for the precise reason that the garage door is not considered secure. The protocols for opening the door wirelessly are known insecure and municipalities have required outdoor doors at the interface due to the number of home invasions and burglaries through the garage.

At least in my experience people are a lot more likely to leave the garage door unlocked than the front door, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Agreed. Our garages have always had three entries: one from the house, one via garage door, and a side door. Side door was always locked, garage door always closed (never locked though), and the door between house and garage not only almost never locked, but often flat out open because that's where we put the litter box.

haha, our litter box is there as well. vinyl floors in mudroom are easiest to clean.

It's functionally true. Thinking off the top of my head I can come up with at least a dozen examples growing up of friends w/ these doors. Not a single one was ever locked. Most of the time w/ school-age kids they would be left purposefully unlocked so the kids could let themselves in after school w/ the garage door PIN code.

I honestly can't think of a single person I know who routinely locks those doors.

I've lived in many houses in the US (eight, some new, some older, in five states) and only one had a deadbolt on the door from the garage to the house interior. All have had normal locks and were exterior-door-quality. So, definitely not a universal truth.

i also keep expensive things in the garage: onewheel, a couple good bikes, a lot of nice tools. i assume this is true for quite a few homeowners.

Sometimes garages even have cars in them!

Not to mention... a car, as there's a car theft crisis nearly everywhere in the past 2-3 years. I consider the garage just another room in my home. I consider entering my garage akin to entering my house

They think it will work because if you refuse to do it they won't refund your stolen package unless you file a police report, and convenience with huge downsides wins with consumers 99% of the time over effort with no downsides.

This is just conjecture, btw, I have no authoritative knowledge of their plans to do anything.

As things are, missing packages are not really a police matter for the recipient. Recipients don't actually know that a package was stolen, since it never made it into their possession. Amazon could certainly file police reports, but that requires a higher bar of evidence than throw-and-go delivery service provides, and either way it Doesn't Scale (TM).

I'd guess it's more likely the opposite dynamic, where they'll get a bunch of early adopter types to sign up without thinking through the ramifications. And then after the honeymoon period, Amazon will start demanding those users file police reports for missing packages since from their system it now looks much more airtight that the package must have been stolen from the buyer.

That's assuming that the delivery driver isn't defrauding both amazon and the customer.

I've got an 80% hit rate at best across all carriers (in the US). I'm constantly trading mail with my neighbors due to mis-deliveries. It's a good thing we now have the option to go mostly paperless for important documents at least..

Heck, I get food misdelivered to me at times! I might as well be a last mile delivery service

I use it for expensive items. My garage door opener has an integrated security camera.

Why not you and your neigbor just give your address as

Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5)

Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5)

or whatever colors they are? If they are the same color, repaint one of them.

As a bonus, this will completely throw off all the automated data brokers, idiots that use "KYC" as an excuse to want to know where you sleep, etc.

Alternatively put an apartment number on your house (there will be only one apartment, of course.)

One of you will be

855 Foo St. Apt. 1

The other will be

885 Foo St. Apt. A

This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack.

This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, there is zero point in ever using it unless one is literally doing metered US Mail.

The trick is if your address is unreadable by the standardizers it gets printed as-is and it ends up with humans processing it.

If you write "885 Foo St. (blue house)" it will get standardized to "885 Foo St."

If you write "Blue house on Foo St. (eight eight five)" the standardizers will choke and it will be printed as-is.

I'm sure that sometimes happens successfully as you describe, but having worked in ecommerce for a long time, many larger retailers will throw addresses like that either back at the customer until they "fix it" or to a queue where customer service will attempt to "fix it" including by calling you. The carriers (like FedEx etc.) really like standardized addresses. So this could result in delays in getting your order.

> A stressed out underpaid and overworked delivery driver is the last person I want in my garage. Verified deliveries are left at the wrong house

It doesn't work like this. Delivery workers use an app that opens the door, so if they are at a wrong location, it will be immediately apparent.

Subject to location service accuracy, which as we know, is ±1m... in movies, ±10m in reality... except more often it's ±50m or worse, because who knows why.

Not at all. Since the app is linked to a system that opens your specific garage door, it will be obvious because they push the button and the door in front of them does not open.

This can happen. A delivery person comes to a door, presses the button in their app, and nothing happens. So it's immediately obvious that they are at a wrong location.

And they know that they can't just leave the package there, they have to find the correct door. And there's a flow in the Amazon delivery app to mark an incorrect geolocation, so they won't be penalized for taking longer time.

The app also has pictures of the location in question, to minimize the confusion.

From the homeowner's side, the garage door will be open for half a minute or so with nobody nearby. It's possible for a burglar to use this time to quickly run inside. But the probability of that is pretty low, and there'll be a camera recording of that.

> And they know that they can't just leave the package there, they have to find the correct door.

Except that's not true at all. Amazon had my new house geolocated wrong (think robin instead of arden st in their system, even though I put the address in correct and it read back correct).

First delivery came, "delivered", not at my door... Contact CS, get a refund, continue.

"Ok, I'll setup key so they know it's wrong and deliver it in my garage."

Pieced together from video:

Second delivery arrives at wrong location, garage door opens...and was never closed. "delivered"

Took me contacting CS 5 times, with 5 failed deliveries, and doing an email bomb to get them to update my geo-location. Turned out it was literally across the fucking city, ~8 miles away.

My point is Amazon is blaming customers for fraud when it's the fault of a delivery mistake such as dropping the package at the wrong address. Or the drivers themselves stealing the packages.

Let Amazon sell you a garagecam that they can feed into their driver surveillance system.

Have you seen Walmart advertising delivery to your refrigerator? Absolute insanity.

Actually, this would be cool for say a fridge in a mudroom...

What's old is new again!

https://www.core77.com/posts/103681/When-Houses-Had-Built-In...

This is infinitely more sensible than some crazy internet connected garage door opener scheme. Somehow I think it's far to sensible for modern culture though. Everyone's lost their minds.

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