Amazon, the time has come to give you a key | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, the time has come to give you a key

peternixey.com

51 pointsjordn50 comments

Just to clarify (because the comments here are suggesting that a lockbox does what I'm asking for) - a lockbox does not address the issue for me. Lockboxes are never all that local and they don't carry heavy things home for you.

I literally want Amazon to go directly into my home and leave the goods in there. I want to order groceries on my phone and find them in my flat. Frozen items don't matter - I won't order them, it doesn't matter if they sit for a while. I want to leave a return package in my hallway and have it taken back by someone who collects it.

I know that this sounds entitled but I also know that Amazon's already got the chops to support this and that if they did I would buy a lot more from them (like maybe £50/week more from them). Combined with Prime it would mean I would never want to order from any other merchant either.

Physical security means nothing to you, does it?

Physical security is a nice myth given Amazon itself sells bump keys and there is no shortage of rocks near by. Threat of prosecution (with CCTV as evidence) on the other hand might be the main deterrent for majority of typical households.

Leaving the house compromises my physical security.

Your comment is easy and throwaway and I think you probably already what I'm about to say but life is a balancing act between security and utility.

The web and history are littered with examples of things that a "hacker mentality" would have baulked at in theory. AirBnB, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Uber. All of these things would have triggered the line "Identity/Physical security means nothing to you does it?". And yet, for many people, they are more than worth the risk involved.

We live in an age where it's accepted that perfect strangers should rent our house or drive our car and yet it seems odd that we should allow a liveried delivery man access to our house. How bizarre.

To be fair, many of the people using those services only poorly understand the involved dangers, and many of the people pointing out it harms security, don't.

"We live in an age where it's accepted that perfect strangers should rent our house or drive our car"

Well, no. We live in an age where a vanishingly small percentage of the population does these things.

Based on Airbnb's trends[1], the only way the number can be "vanishingly small" is if an even greater number of people are deliberately stopping these behaviours. Where are you seeing that happening?

[1]: https://www.airbnb.co.uk/annual

That page says 300,000 listings, versus ~300m people in the US, makes 0.1%. That's not a large percentage; you could find a greater number of people who believe the moon landings are faked.

That's quite true, but for many of those we're starting to see the pushback, however gradual, on such invasive services. It's pretty funny to watch.

As for the renting house/car bit...that's far from widespread (for better or worse).

>Leaving the house compromises my physical security

I'll give you three guesses as to where I go when I do want physical security. Hint: it rhymes with "my own goddamn house".

>Your comment is easy and throwaway and I think you probably already what I'm about to say but life is a balancing act between security and utility.

And as far as I'm concerned, I've reached my balancing point. Well, that may not be entirely true (the local lockbox thing sounds groovy), but giving some dude from Amazon a literal key to my home unbalances that.

>The web and history are littered with examples of things that a "hacker mentality" would have baulked at in theory. AirBnB, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Uber. All of these things would have triggered the line "Identity/Physical security means nothing to you does it?". And yet, for many people, they are more than worth the risk involved.

I don't know about all you hip SV folk, but I almost never use any of the things you've mentioned above, though I realize that specifics aren't really the point here. If you'd like to go ahead and give Amazon your home key, by all means, go ahead. I've opted out of Facebook (shadow profiles notwithstanding) and I'd likely opt out of this as well. If this were an opt-in sort of agreement (and I won't assume that it would be), then it's A-OK with me. And by the way, the "baulked at in theory" line doesn't really do anything for your particular argument. I could say that about anything, really, but it's not terribly convincing.

>We live in an age where it's accepted that perfect strangers should rent our house or drive our car and yet it seems odd that we should allow a liveried delivery man access to our house. How bizarre.

Perhaps you live in that world. I own neither a house nor a car, and if I did I'm fairly certain there would be minimal stranger activity within either of them.

What do you think of a service like http://keycafe.com/? Rather than picking up your package from a lockbox, the delivery person would grab your keys from what's essentially a lockbox.

that's basically exactly what I'm thinking as the solution, yes

I would never let a random stranger enter my house when no one is at home.

But DHL is trying an alternative in Germany at the moment: it's a box you buy from DHL and install on your property. DHL has a key so they can drop parcels in there and they will take returns with them. They send an SMS when they open it. You can even share a box with your neighbours. Of course the box has a limited size but for me that size would cover 95% of the parcels I receive.

See http://www.paketda.de/dhl/paketkasten.php (german)

Presumably the worry is fairly simple: You get a delivery. We agree our driver was in your house alone and unmonitored. You claim £50 in cash has gone missing. Our driver claims they didn't take it.

Do we trust our drivers so much we tell you, the customer, that you must be lying?

Do we trust our customers so much we fire (or caution) the drivers with no physical evidence?

Do we fit all our drivers with wide-angle all-around body cameras? Will drivers object to that, like some developers (myself included) object to using screen capture software? What if for any reason the camera wasn't functioning? Do we fit cameras in customers' homes?

I can tell you for sure that in an operation as large as Amazon there is some fraud by customers and some fraud by drivers.

I live in an apartment building. UPS delivers my Amazon orders to the office and the office delivers them to my apartment. It's nice.

Where? In The US? I also live in apartment building and some UPS drivers will try and deliver to the apartments and if there is no one home, they deliver to the office; while other UPS drivers just skip it and deliver everything straight to the office. The office never delivers to the apartments, we have to go and pick them up. It's in the lease that they cannot enter to deliver a package. (Other than an emergency, they have to give advance notice and it does not apply to packages.) It's been the same in three different apartment buildings in Virginia, over the last 25 years.

Seattle.

I never thought about it before, but this would be awesome, especially considering:

1) Security webcams are so cheap these days, it would be trivial to catch any delivery person who has "other ideas". And if delivery services started doing this, they'd probably have their delivery people wear cameras as well, to protect again false claims from residents with "other ideas"

2) Keycode entry locks allow delivery people to have a code, not to carry around keys, each delivery service could have their own keycode, and if you wanted, you could even create single-use codes tied to specific deliveries (much like single-use credit card numbers), well assuming there are locks that support that

3) As an even greater security measure, you can prevent the codes from working while you're at home, asleep, etc., so no threat to your personal physical security

I mean, I'd go even farther than the OP and be asking FreshDirect to put the ice cream directly in my freezer.

But then again, literally the most valuable single object I own is my laptop. People with valuable jewelry collections might not be so enthusiastic.

Well, when we have the automated delivery trucks with some standardized connector on our house with our homes central server controlling processing of deliveries, we won't need the USPS guy to put my ice cream in the freezer, but for now it sounds like a nice stopgap.

As someone else with not much in the ways of physical possessions, I fully agree. I remember once I left my place for the weekend and forgot to lock the door, but I had my laptop on me so no worries. And it's not even the laptop, that's just a cheap $450 code editing box. Now that I type this I remember I have all of my data backed up across three different servers and I realize there are really no physical possessions I couldn't stand to lose. Come on in Amazon!

I always wondered by UPS/FedEx don't have keys to the outside or every apt building have "drop boxes" - large empty boxes that UPS/FedEx could put in a package, lock it with the key, then drop the key in the mailbox of the person who needs it.

Thinking a bit more - I wonder if lockitron could solve this allowing "carriers" to enter, drop off package or put groceries away (for the most part) - cold items in freezer, perishable items in fridge, etc.

Super interest - also how a retail spans years with various connections/products and integrates into your life.

Canada Post's community mailboxes have oversized slots for packages, which work on exactly the model you propose. I gather it works reasonably well.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no desire to have random delivery staff wandering in and out of my apartment. If that means I have to shop for my own groceries, rather than having them delivered, then that's what I'll do. This also has the benefit that I can pick my own produce, rather than relying on someone who works for Peapod or similar, who likely gets paid rather poor wages, and who, to pick one particularly memorable example, has no particular interest in seeing to it that I get fresh, firm, ripe bell peppers instead of sallow, sunken, half-gone-over ones.

But the oversized slots don't actually fit all oversized items.

And depending on how Amazon, Dell, etc. packages the boxes, it can be bigger than it needs to be or multiple items are put in one box requiring you to go pick up at the nearest post office anyway.

"Oversized" only by comparison with the regular mail slots in the postbox, not by comparison with actual packages. It wouldn't be a bad idea to add a few much larger slots, perhaps in a second housing alongside or below the existing one.

I used to live in a set of townhouses that did exactly your "drop box" idea. It worked really well, and I thought that it was quite common.

then drop the key in the mailbox of the person who needs it.

Usually apartment mailboxes are locked, so that only USPS and the box owner can access them. There is no slot accessible to drop the key in.

Main problem is that no one is allowed to put stuff in a USPS mailbox except the USPS. So our condo complex does have this setup for mail packages that are too big to fit in our locked mailbox, but UPS/FedEx can't use it.

USPS is doing a lot of last-mile fulfillment for the private couriers, so that maybe be one way around it.

Speaking of which, when did UPS start just dropping off packages with USPS rather than trying to deliver them themselves? Came by once at 1:00 (naturally at work) and then off to USPS. I was really surprised when this happened the other week, and it seems like a bit of a misuse of the postal service. Frankly, I think if couriers just changed to doing a lot of their delivery after normal work hours it would fix a lot of this. Swing shift delivery - it works.

Almost all my Amazon packages come by USPS now, it used to be fairly evenly split between USPS and UPS. Not sure how it happened, but I prefer it.

As far as misuse of USPS, if the postal service is getting paid for it, not only is it not misuse, it's revenue they need.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I agree that allowing delivery drivers/drones into the house is the best solution, and with Amazon I would have no worries about doing this as they would make sure drivers behaved. However for other companies or random delivery companies contracted out... not so sure.

I've been developing an alternative solution. A secure box that you can put outside your home which delivery drivers can request access to. The box's lock is similar to lockitron or bike locks that can be controlled with a phone. This would require the delivery driver to have an app installed to communicate with the box and the owner, which is not always going to be the case. I'm working on allowing the driver to request access by identifying themselves to the owner via voice or video (VOIP/camera) even if they don't have a smartphone/don't have the app.

I have uploaded a video of super early prototype here: https://vimeo.com/85355890

Anyway thought I'd chip in as I'm working on it. I've set up a landing page a http://www.lockboxx.co if anyone wants to find out more.

Why not put a keypad on the box, then generate limited-use codes that delivery people can use?

Then it can be used with local delivery services and the like with no extra work needed past a "put it in the lockbox at the front, code is 393536" instruction.

Also sounds like a good solution. I will look into this instead of VOIP/camera.

I wonder why he writes that the lockerbox didn't work. Deutsche Post introduced them here in Germany a few years ago and they are used to capacity.

I've had this "I'm never gonna do it but it sure would be nice" idea about a refrigerated postbox rollout for years:

First you put a refrigerated lockerbox in the most densely populated neighborhoods to get the unbroken refrigeration chain infrastructure flowing. Then, over the years, homeowners could install a two-sided refrigerator in the external wall of their house. That refrigerator would have electronic locks on both sides. The locks on the outside can only be opened by the various deliverymen and the lock on the inside can be opened only by you.

The remaining risk would be a deliveryman cleaning out your fridge, but since everything is logged these days, we'll at least catch the guy.

Why would you need any sort of "lock" on the inside at all, aside from a physical latch that can't be opened from inside the refrigerator?

If someone's already in my house, the contents of my delivery-fridge are the least of my concerns.

In most cases, anything that can't be opened from inside the fridge would also do it. The lock on the inside is only neccessary if it's a house with multiple renting parties and there are multiple such refrigerators in the wall between the outside and the hallway, as opposed to one refrigerator between each flat and the hallway.

Presumably the idea being such the delivery fridge key grants access to the fridge and not the house?

Yes, of course. I failed to specify this in my other reply to the parent.

>First you put a refrigerated lockerbox in the most densely populated neighborhoods to get the unbroken refrigeration chain infrastructure flowing. Then, over the years, homeowners could install a two-sided refrigerator in the external wall of their house. That refrigerator would have electronic locks on both sides. The locks on the outside can only be opened by the various deliverymen and the lock on the inside can be opened only by you.

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite... is this before, or after the majority of the population has learned to differentiate their computer tower from their monitor?

I don't know. IMO this is not more complicated than typical car-sharing services, and these work splendidly, judging based on what I hear from Berlin.

On a side note: Dear car-sharing startups, _Berlin is not Germany_! The main difference between Berlin and the rest of Germany is that in the rest of Germany, people tend to have more disposable income, so please give us some love. (Grumpily looks at own, maintenance-hungry car.)

And if I had to rank shutting down a home PC on a difficulty spectrum, it would be pretty damn near the "Low" end, but... there it is.

There's a project I'm distantly involved with to roll remotely unlockable insulated boxes out to homes for supermarket delivery, but it's stalled. :(

While not possible for everybody, a dropbox is what you want:

http://www.amazon.com/Architectural-Mailboxes-6900RZ-Elephan...

Effectively, your own deposit-only lockbox that any mail service can use.

Wow this is the most unusable page I've ever loaded in mobile. Can't read a single thing.

Works fine for me. Do you request desktop version?

I've started picking up amazon deliveries at local shops (Collect+). This is working out rather well - no need for special lockbox or a supersize ring o' keys.

That is pretty much the convention here in Berlin... they just drop the package either at the kiosk downstairs, or to a neighbor.

A lot more convenient than when they (luckily rarely) decide to drop the package to the local post office, which is quite far away and closes early.

I've just taken a return back to my nearest convenient Collect+ location. It's a 30 minute walk away, despite me living on a busy shopping road with lots of suitable places.

They really need to expand this a considerable amount. I'm not against the idea of giving keys to Amazon, if done in the right way. More ideally, I'd have an electronic lock that could grant them access for particular orders.

Every house in my neighborhood has a disused milk-delivery-box on the driveway side that could easily store smallish parcels. It would be so simple to convert those into locking delivery boxes.

Move into a high end condo. Front desk will sign for packages for you and the doorman can put them in your unit.

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