Amazon Receives Patent For Drone "Surveillance As A Service"

21/06/2019

Tech giant Amazon has received a U.S. patent to provide “surveillance as a service.”

The patent is for an “unmanned aerial vehicle”, which is a technical term for a drone, that “may perform a surveillance action at a property of an authorized party”, and could “image the property to generate surveillance images.”

First filed in June 2015 and granted in June 4th 2019, Amazon suggests in its patent that drone-based surveillance would be superior to what traditional video-camera installations can in terms of range and liability. According to Amazon, traditional video-cameras are also more vulnerable to manipulation and damage.

This is why, according to Amazon, drone-based surveillance is a logical next step.

An image taken from Amazon’s patent for “surveillance as a service”
An image taken from Amazon’s patent for “surveillance as a service”

The company has been talking about using drones to deliver packages since 2013.

And when it comes to surveillance, the company has received numerous criticisms regarding its surveillance capabilities, and not to mention all the data Amazon routinely collects from its customer.

Ring, which is Amazon's smart doorbell, is able to send video feed that customers can check and answer directly from their phone. Amazon also has Neighbors, which is a crime-reporting social network that encourages users to upload videos straight from their Ring security cameras and tag the posts with labels.

Amazon also offers Amazon Key, a service that allows its Prime members to have packages delivered straight into their homes, available for those who have installed Amazon's smart lock on their door and Amazon security cameras inside their homes.

On the other hand, Amazon’s Echo and voice-assisted personal assistant, Alexa, is already present in at least a quarter of all U.S. homes as of 2018.

A big roadblock to surveillance drones for Amazon is that the Federal Aviation Administration is not yet finished working out the regulations regarding commercial drone flights in neighborhoods - particularly when the drone's flights are autonomous and beyond the operator’s line of sight.

Amazon's patent application is attributed to inventors Kalidas Yeturu and Howard Lee Huddleston Jr., as they call for making use of the drones that Amazon is developing for package deliveries.

But in this “surveillance as a service” patent, Amazon said that surveillance would be a “secondary task” of such a drone-based system, after package delivery.

As explained by the inventors, those drones could be leveraged to perform surveillance duties as secondary tasks before or after making deliveries.

The company further suggests a user may want to “subscribe to a surveillance system to provide surveillance as a service.”

A key point here is that the data gathered by the drones’ cameras and sensors would be processed to respect the privacy of those outside a predefined security perimeter. “While gathering surveillance images, or after the surveillance images have been gathered, the geo-fence information may be used to obscure or remove image data referring to objects outside the geo-fence,” the application says.

Such “geo-clipping” could be done through physically constraining the drones’ sensors, or by screening the data during or after image capture.