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I’m a researcher in this field. First, do you have any evidence that routes are unrestricted? I’m not involved in this particular test, but my guess is that the
by 0xffff2 7y ago
I’m a researcher in this field. First, do you have any evidence that routes are unrestricted? I’m not involved in this particular test, but my guess is that there are extremely specific restrictions. In the more general case, the US government (primarily NASA and the FAA) are actively working on coming up with the regulations that will cover this on a permanent basis, and they will absolutely consider privacy among literally hundreds of other factors.
- pacala 7y agoThe core premise of the technology is delivery to every home. To deliver to every home, you need to have a camera pointed to every home, and their neighbors, and the people / cars on the street. Not sure what your point is, are you proposing drones are going to fly blind due to some regulation? Can _you_ provide evidence of such regulation? Are you asking us to trust megacorps to not make maximum use of their surveillance data? When they've been caught time and again with the hand in the privacy cookie jar? When they turned the Internet into a 24/7 panopticon, with every web page carrying tens of surveillance beacons connected to the motherhive?
- tzs 7y agoRestricting routes to following existing streets would limit the privacy issues considerably. A drone following the street should not need to look at much other than the what is on or next to the street. Compare to no route restrictions, where you would probably have the drones flying over people's back yards, which would be a considerable reduction in privacy.
- propogandist 7y agoif drones are just following existing streets, there's nothing innovative with drone delivery... it will just be ridiculously more inefficient than todays modes of delivery. No sane vendor will agree to these sort of terms and these companies do not care about privacy, they are all in the data mining and advertising business.
- shadowgovt 7y agoAirborne vehicles can fly faster than ground speed and aren't constrained by rush-hour traffic.
- tzs 7y agoBesides the points already mentioned by shadowgovt, another big advantage of drones over existing modes of delivery even if drones have to follow existing streets is that they can be self-flying fairly easily. Unlike self-driving cars, self-flying drones do not have to worry about people running into their path, cars parked in the parking lane adjacent to their line suddenly opening a door into their line, or sharing the road with unpredictable human driven vehicles. The drone route regulations will be starting with routes that have no other traffic except birds and insects. The routes can be designed so that there are different levels for north, south, east, and west travel, so except at the endpoints a drone never has to worry about encountering another drone moving in a different direction. It only has to deal with drones coming up from behind or coming up on drones ahead of it.
- alanbernstein 7y agoAre you suggesting that these drones will follow streets for the entirety of their routes? Doesn't that nearly defeat the purpose of flying? Can you imagine if airplanes had to follow interstates for their entire flights?
- btreecat 7y agoThese particular air craft do not use cameras for navigation.
- OrgNet 7y agoWhy do you have such a basic question if you are a researcher in this field?
- anonymous009988 7y agoBecause he is not a researcher? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326703
- 0xffff2 7y agoFair point, but it’s a very fuzzy line. In some contexts I don’t call myself a researcher because I’m not a PhD and O don’t publish much. In this context, I think I bring exactly the same context as any other researcher on my team.
- 0xffff2 7y agoThe basic question being whether the vehicles are flying restricted routes? Because those sorts of details are very much determined for an individual test and as I said I’m not involved with this one.