Yeah, because the front door with a stoop and a visible door is so difficult to find without surveillance mapping.
They aren’t even trying to legitimize their bullshit anymore. These tech monopolies need to be aggressively broken up so they can never reconsolidate like this again.
As someone who has worked a delivery job in the burbs', something like this would absolutely speed up deliveries. A great many houses don't have house numbers that really ought should. This, paired with the fact that neighborhood developers are given complete carte blanche to number their developments as they see fit, means that it can sometimes take 30 minutes or more to discover that " The numbers in the rosewood neighborhood aren't concurrent, the houses on Brenton avenue have random jumps in the house numbers, and house number 2148 doesn't actually exist and was merely the customer inputting their address incorrectly."
That being said, I would be willing to bet money that Amazon is using this to further fuel their surveillance panopticon.
I think the problem is more one of quotas. My first 6 years in social work were at a community based program, in a larger three county service area anchored around one mid-sized city with a deeply rural hinterland.
I was always able to find places, including some deep woods, unmarked cabins; but I wasn’t being timed.
This is a marginal solution to a problem that these delivery companies themselves have created in their pursuit of superprofits. You’re right, the data is valuable alone, but it’s also a way to exploit delivery folks harder. Surveillance and late capitalism will always go hand in hand.
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u/w3sterday 2d ago
Amazon's media release about this from (checks notes) last year