Have your ever thought, how convenient it might be to have your package delivered inside your house or apartment when you are not at home, or get your friends to access your place to feed your cat, when you forgot to give them a key? Well, Amazon had already been thinking about such opportunity for a while.
In fact, the world of IoT is not sleeping and is in the process of creation of new things to make your life easier. On October 25th, 2017, Amazon has launched a new service to comfort its customers at most – the Amazon Key to allow an in-home delivery.
The idea behind that is to allow the Amazon courier to deliver the packages, you have ordered, to your place and leave it behind your front door, even if you are out of your place. Amazon has gone much further than just the smart key, as it provides a whole kit of services, like cloud camera, smart lock and application. For now, the service is available only for Amazon Prime users and it costs around 250$.
So, how does it work?
You order from Amazon and on the day of delivery you are notified that your package is about to arrive. Then, it is just up to you to authorize a carrier to enter your house or not. And, if you’ve decided to let a stranger to come in, the smart lock will open the door. Though, to ensure full security of your belongings, you get the chance to watch the stranger-carrier through the camera installed in front of your door, which starts working when there is motion detected.
Besides, you are also able to allow your entrusted people to enter your place by the same way – authorizing them through the application.
Isn’t it great?! Isn’t it a good solution to manage your tasks at home, while being not at home?
Unfortunately, according to Recode, only 5% of Americans and 4% of Prime Amazon users would definitely add this new tech to their homes, while 60% would not take this step.
But, why there is such a negative reaction to this new and so convenient tool? The answer is easy – security! There rises a tough question – do you trust people to enter your house, even if they are watched? The reason for such attitude is that the security is based only on one small camera that is supposed to record every motion that is going on inside your house.
Therefore, according to The Verge, the cloud cam would be able to learn what are the normal in-house motions, like your dog, cat or your child and in future, it would easily distinguish some foreign to your house triggers in order to produce various alerts (the camera is also installed with microphone and speakers).
In result, it is up to you – to step on the side of safety or the side of convenience.
Though, there is always a question of security as we are entering a new way of living, by allowing technology to make a great change in the things that we are so used to. But, maybe, it is worth giving up some old norms, patterns and habits and open new doors to the other era.