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If you're concerned about package thieves, just buy an outdoor cabinet and put it next to your door with a note asking that packages be placed in it. I use an
by tivert 8y ago
If you're concerned about package thieves, just buy an outdoor cabinet and put it next to your door with a note asking that packages be placed in it. I use an Ikea Josef:
https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-furniture/outdoor-organising/josef-cabinet-in-outdoor-dark-grey-art-00168990/ https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-furniture/outdoo...
You don't even need a lock for it. If you can get the deliverymen to consistently place packages in it, the thieves will have no idea if there's actually a package at your door to steal or not without actually attempting a theft. For extra deterrence, you can install a motion activated camera next to it. The idea is to reduce the thieves' expectation of reward while increasing their expectation of getting caught.
- bovermyer 8y agoOne fun psychological hack for this - paint an eye above or on said locker. This is backed by research. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-22270052 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-22270052
- samstave 8y ago@jdb here on HN had, at one time, installed a very conspicuous camera housing on his house although it had no camera in it. Psychological deterrence.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoIt would be fun to have it do motion tracking (could use directional audio to track). It always freaks people out when a camera like device is following their movement.
- rdtsc 8y ago"Ooh! I'll take the package and the fancy tracking camera" :-)
- ChuckMcM 8y agoYeah, this is why I would be a lousy package thief, I'd love to find a cool gizmo like this and take it apart and figure out how it works. Not some boring iPad or game console :-) If you wonder "Who would carry a portable spectrum analyzer while walking along a street of Christmas light displays in order to see what wireless systems were being employed to control them?" that would be me.
- theon144 8y agotakes out a screw-driver, begins lengthy and conspicuous disassembly process (-:
- samstave 8y agoActually I've always wondered about such a heist. If I were going to pull off a heist in broad daylight, I'd get some cones and print a Rolex logo on a safety vest and pull a van up to the Rolex town clock in Carmel and "take it in for repairs" in broad daylight.
- samstave 8y agoAnyone have directions to the actual factory??
- lozaning 8y agoWyze cam Pan will do this for 30 bucks if you're looking for a product and not a tinkering project.
- kbenson 8y agoAt the point we're talking about a fake camera, directional audio is probably overkill. Just put one of those cheap motion trackers up that turns on lights and hook it up to a relatively loud actuator that shows that camera moving very slowly for 3-4 seconds. Sound to draw attention if they didn't already see it, movement so they think it's smart enough to track them or someone is controlling it, and it looks like a camera so they think they are being recorded.
- jjeaff 8y agoOr just get an actual camera and set it to track back and forth. Most of them have that option.
- kbenson 8y agoYeah, at this point wifi cameras are cheap enough there's not really a reason not to just put a real one up instead of this. 15-30 years ago this might have been a good strategy though. Back then any sort of network enabled camera was kinda pricey, as well as the system to run it.
- cr0sh 8y agoWhile not the cheapest, the best wifi camera I've found so far was to build one from a RasPi Zero W, and install motionEyeOS on it. From there, you could add simple motion tracking (OpenCV or something like that - there's enough in the distro to easily do blob tracking) and command a servo to track. Total cost for the basic camera setup (not the tracking extra) was around $60.00 - and you don't have to pay for a cloud service or anything like that (I just have it email me the images), plus it's open source, so you can vet the codebase if you need or want.
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- jdblair 8y agoActually, it had a camera. It was an ordinary webcam but it was mounted in a very conspicuous, conventional security camera housing.
- reaperducer 8y agoa very conspicuous camera housing on his house although it had no camera in it. Radio Shack used to sell these in the 80's. A guy I knew who worked at one said easily half of the cameras in his mall were fake RS shells.
- fludlight 8y agoFull text of the article cited on the author's website: https://www.danielnettle.org.uk/download/131.pdf https://www.danielnettle.org.uk/download/131.pdf
- Strilanc 8y agoThis is one of the psychology results that failed to replicate [1] in the replication crisis [2]. [1]: Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: two meta-analyses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816301350 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
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- qblv 8y agoReminds of 1984. Big brother is watching
- ergothus 8y agoIn the video we see many people stealing from porches with video cameras, and the author mentions that the police didn't take action even with video evidence. While I think your suggestion would reduce the chance of theft, I think you overestimate the accuracy of the risk-benefit analysis happening in the thieves' minds, as well as the actual risk involved. I mean, the activity is already dumb from a risk analysis point of view. But if they don't know of a package, they won't try to steal it. That is the area that I do think would do well.
- blacksmith_tb 8y agoI don't think the video evidence is meant to help the police (or, obviously, to deter the thieves), but it's useful for requesting a replacement from the shipper.
- bufferoverflow 8y agoI don't think the shippers are responsible for any theft that's not caused by their staff.
- edc117 8y agoDoes anyone know the answer to this? I'm very curious. I actually wonder if it would be worse to report that you have video evidence of a thief, because they may no longer be liable (hey, we delivered it to where it had to go, rest is up to you) vs just saying 'it never got here'.
- laumars 8y agoI can’t speak for everywhere but in the UK most places will send you a replacement if the item was left on a porch and then stolen rather than with your neighbors. That is considered a failure of the delivery company. Further to that point, I haven’t even needed to provide evidence of stuff having been stolen. Which seems like a system ripe for abuse but it’s nice that it’s weighted in the customers favour for a change. Thankfully I’ve not needed to complain about stolen stuff in a long while, partly because generally stuff is tossed over a fence or left with neighbors. But mostly because I now live in a quiet village so I don’t get the same kind of passing opportunists like I did when I lived on a busy school road.
- redeemedfadi 8y agoFull disclosure: I work on this: https://www.getboxlock.com/ https://www.getboxlock.com/
- tlrobinson 8y agoNeat. Does it somehow know which barcodes belong to your packages, or could a thief rip a barcode off any package and use it to unlock it?
- redeemedfadi 8y agoYes, it knows which packages belong to you. It will only unlock if the package is being delivered to that specific lock and the package is "out for delivery".
- NotHereNotThere 8y agoI honestly don't really see this working? What incentive does the delivery driver have to spend more time scanning the box (place the label in view for the barcode scanner), unlock, open the door, place box, relock it I can 100% imagine the driver just putting the box on top and leaving, or trying quickly to scan and have it fail then again put the box on top.
- redeemedfadi 8y agoThis is probably the biggest roadblock to this product's success. However BoxLock is in talks with all the major carriers to provide training. The carriers themselves are incentivized to use BoxLock because it provides a guarantee that the package was delivered successfully and securely. They don't want packages stolen either. You can add delivery instructions to most shipments that tells the delivery driver to use BoxLock.
- shaftway 8y agoYeah, we had a package stolen off our porch, so we did that. It's a bench with a liftable top. The plan was to put a padlock on it. All of our packages are addressed to: Shaftway Place in Bench - Code 1234 24601 Where I Live St. My City, ST, ZipZipZip We order a lot of stuff, and probably average 3 deliveries per day. In the last 3 months we've had exactly one package placed in the bench. And we never even got around to putting the padlock on it. All a delivery person has to do is lift the lid. Delivery people don't care. I probably wouldn't either if I were one. I'm not going to read the boxes I'm delivering for instructions; I'm just going to leave it on the porch like I do with 99.99% of other boxes.
- nzealand 8y agoWe have a foot high fence in front of our door. That plus a grassy slope is enough to hide the packages from street view. Our neighbor across the street gets their packages stolen often. I have never had any package stolen, and I order 100x times as many packages.
- apricot 8y agoTo be frank, I had to read it a couple times before parsing "Place in Bench - Code 1234" as "Delivery person, please put this parcel inside the bench, using the code 1234". We expect addresses to be data, not executable code.
- shaftway 8y agoRefactoring suggestions welcome. I don't think there's enough room for an if-clause, definitely not a for-loop.
- tivert 8y agoThey key is to put yourself into the mindset of a hurried deliveryman and design your system around that. I have a sign low on my door right where a deliveryman would leave a package that asks him to put it in the box (with a simple message in big text, a big red arrow pointing towards the box and a photo of it with a package inside). There's no lock to get in his way. Deliverymen from all carriers use my box about 90% of the time they want to deliver to my doorstep. For Amazon specifically (since their deliverymen are gig workers), I entered address-specific delivery instructions into their system, mainly so I could complain about their performance more effectively. I think the actual, physical sign is more effective. I have a camera watching the porch and have a few videos of deliverymen doing a double-take on the sign, then putting the package in the box.
- mattmillr 8y agoI do this with a patio box, but added a door sensor that transmits to our alarm/home automation system and triggers a recording from the camera aimed at that area and a push notification to my phone. UPS is good at putting packages in the box. On good days, FedEx might get them in the vicinity of the porch.
- dv_dt 8y agoI've been wondering why Amazon oriented their smart lock delivery service to an orwellian camera and lock in the home setup instead of hooked to an outdoor box like this.
- gnicholas 8y agoBecause they want to deliver groceries into your fridge in the near future.
- cr0sh 8y agoI can only imagine that in my case (if I were dumb enough to use such a service): After getting past my barking dogs (plus the small one that likes to bite people) - they'd get to the fridge, the dogs would shut up ("the person is going to the magic box where good tasting things come from - maybe they'll drop something!"), open up the fridge... ...then get to "play tetris" trying to fit the crap inside an already full unit.
- dv_dt 8y agoEven worse in terms of invasiveness.
- influx 8y agoThe lessor known service allows you to deliver to your car's trunk: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17051031011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17051031011
- quickthrower2 8y agoThe Josef might be worth stealing though.
- archon810 8y agohttps://www.getboxlock.com https://www.getboxlock.com
- 333c 8y agoWith all due respect, this sounds like the wrong solution. (1) It's too much of a hassle. Delivery drivers probably won't bother (2) What's to stop a thief from scanning a fake barcode?