Amazon wants to use delivery drones to surveil your house

protocol.com

18 points·longdefeat··8 comments

Ya all understand that a delivery drone is going to sound like a leaf blower right?

It bothers me that not many people talk about this. The future in which the drone buzz above your head all the time is something I wouldn’t be enjoying. Hope these things don’t catch on.

The noise isn't even the worst problem. What happens if a drone fails during flight (e.g., a bird flies into it) and it falls on someone's head? I don't really want aircraft, no matter how small, flying and landing around my neighborhood. (Nobody seems to think about failure modes when talking about flying cars either.)

I can imagine that after the first few widely-publicized accidents, the use of delivery drones in residential areas may be regulated out of existence.

This is an area of active policy development. It's just not sexy so it's not on HN, but it's ongoing.

Do you happen to know if drone operations in the U.S. would be regulated by the FAA, or by state/local governments?

FAA controls all the airspace in the USA, so it would be the FAA

* exception: class G airspace

They wouldn't be the first: https://www.sunflower-labs.com/

This is a really cool product. But how does it detect the arrival of people and then launch the Bee? Surely the Bee has to be in-flight to know there are people there. Unless it's the other sensors that do that detection.

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