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Comment by spo81rty | Hacker News Reader

The argument of stealing a package is no different than following around UPS trucks to steal them.

Except you'd also have to deal with the delivery driver. It's valid to observe that a bored kid may not think much of shooting down a small unmanned quadrotor, whereas they might not be so keen to attack a delivery man or a car containing a delivery man.

You wait until the driver leaves. It's safer than stealing from a drone; someone buying air delivery is probably home and might catch you in the act. If the UPS driver left a package at the door and nobody came out for it, the recipient's probably not home.

That's why they don't just leave packages on the street, at least not any package I've had delivered by courier in the UK. You have to sign for it otherwise it goes back to the depot and they leave you a note.

Must be regional. Whether a signature is required is up to the shipper, and Amazon generally doesn't request one. You could follow a UPS driver around in the US and pick up boxes from in front of doors all day. There are 1700 YouTube videos called "UPS package thief".

Interesting, thanks for the correction.

I don't think the handover issue is a fundamental problem with the drones though. For example you could receive an automated phone call to let you know the package is hovering above your house. If you're ordering something to be delivered in 30 minutes you're probably going to be there to receive it.

But I still see theft in transit as an issue. The moral/mental threshold is surely much lower for shooting down a mechanical fly than it is for raiding a van.

The threshold for destroying a device costing several thousand dollar which is actively having its location monitored?

If a police car is nearby it could be on the scene before the drone even hits the ground and having a few stories of parents getting a giant bill might do the trick.

Also I would imagine that the drone could be transmitting a live video feed. Anyone trying to steal/attack the drone would be recorded trying to do so.

In Germany it's normal that you have to sign for your packages and I'm not aware that there is an option not to do that.

That being said, some delivery people simply dump the package in front of my flat and shipment tracking says I (who wasn't home) signed for it. And of course the fun of living in a dorm with 120 people and the illegible signature (are there others?) and you don't know who it belongs to (because the slip of paper in your mailbox just says "delivered to neighbour").

It's pretty rare in the States to have a sign-for package. I've had $3k worth of refrigerated medicine left on my doorstep all afternoon.

This depends on the ambient level of crime where you live. In my family's home (way out in the middle of nowhere), all packages are just left on the porch (this lax approach allowed me to later leave my backpack in my car overnight in Santa Cruz proper; the window was smashed and the backpack stolen). When I was in San Francisco, leaving packages at your door was apparently not to be thought of.

Personally, I can see the appeal of the strategy "just don't have crime"; things are a lot more convenient that way.

People are missing that this is "30 minutes or less" delivery, which you're only going to do if you're there.

Except that it might be considered a federal crime? If I shot down a manned airplane, wouldn't the consequences be severe?

Yes. There's not much to this article. Same goes for a kid shooting it. It would just like a kid shooting a car or a person. The law provides protection. I suspect regulation will be the biggest obstacle - as it already is in the US.

Actually, this article spotted the real story here. It's just PR for Amazon, and very well timed PR at that.

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