Amazon Will Use Delivery Drones to Collect Data About Your House
Amazon’s ambitions to build a fleet of self-flying delivery drones will have an interesting side-effect: They will create unimaginable quantities of data.
Aerial footage, mapping data, flight patterns, number-crunching analysis, and more — autonomous vehicles produce vast reams of data, and drones are no different. And Amazon is already thinking about how it can turn that to its advantage.
In a filing for a patent granted on Tuesday, the Seattle-based online retail giant lays out how “captured data may be received by a computer system and properties about a destination for the delivery may be identified by analyzing the data. A recommendation may be generated based at least in part on the identified properties.”
In plain English? Amazon’s drones could analyse customers’ homes as they make deliveries, and then try and sell them products and services based on what they “see.”
One example Amazon gives is that it could recommend a roof-repair service if a customer’s roof looks faulty:
“For example, the one or more service provider computers may analyze the data and identify that the roof of the location is in disrepair and in need of service. Subsequently, the one or more service provider computers may generate and provide a recommendation to the customer informing them of the identified property and offering an item or service that is appropriate for the identified property (e.g., a roof repair service recommendation).”
Source: Amazon is thinking about using its delivery drones to scan your house to sell you more stuff
