Amazon drones to scan your house – coming soon?

According to a new patent granted this week, Amazon drones will be able to scan your house when making delivery.

The patent claims that Amazon drones will capture data about properties in order to make future recommendations. Does this sound scary? Indeed it does, but the patent insists the technology will be used to improve your day to day life.

“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.”

Jeff Bezos insists that Amazon Prime Air drones will be as common as mail trucks in the very near future, so a Jetsons-inspired reality soon awaits us. Quite possibly, one where Amazon decides you your roof is patchy and starts emailing you with special deals for shingles.

Let’s see the summary of this patent and what exactly the Amazon Prime Air wants to do:

Techniques are provided for analyzing data obtained while delivering items with unmanned aerial vehicles. For example, instructions may be provided to an unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver an item. The unmanned aerial vehicle may be configured to record data while delivering the item. In embodiments, the 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.

For privacy-concerned citizens, this is not good news. On the bright side, patent’s application is mostly commercial, users will probably be able to select an option that says „Please don’t scan my house, I just wanted the Prime Day deal!”.

In any case, Amazon is no stranger to quirky patterns. They also claimed the idea for „underwater warehouses” that works with inflatable balloons floating objects to the surface.