Amazon Key In-Home Delivery Service is Starting to Make a Lot of Sense

By Rob Stott

Unfortunately, a good chunk of you who are reading this have been in the same exact situation that Mark Rober found himself in recently. Rober, a YouTube personality whose more important work came in the mid-2000s when he worked as an engineer for NASA on the Curiosity rover, was the victim of a recent package theft. According to recent survey data, at least 25 percent of America has had at least one package stolen, a figure that’s likely to rise especially during this gift-giving time of year.

Rober, using some of his engineering background, created a booby-trap package and leaned on his new career to send a viral warning message to package thieves everywhere. Rober’s video, which you can watch just below, has more than 32.2 million views as of Wednesday night, just two days after being posted.

To sum it up, the package Rober creates is rigged with a pound of glitter that gets shot out of the top, and a fart-can that gets automatically dispensed—and all of this is recorded on a rig of four smartphones concealed and hidden inside the package.While hilarious, the video goes to show just how jerkish and inconsiderate people can be. Rober was able to play back five or six different instances where someone took the package off of a doorstep and opened.

But it’s also a video like this that really lends some support to a program like Amazon Key—the in-home delivery service that launched last year and which we initially described as being incredibly creepy. The more we think about it, though, the more it seems to make perfect sense to have a package left securely locked inside your front door rather than out in the open were some scum-of-the-earth individual can just walk by and take it without the fear of being caught or punished for their crime.

Amazon Key is available in 37 cities and suburban metropolitan areas across the country and is a service provided for Amazon Prime members. The service pairs with the company’s Cloud Cam and an approved smart lock to give the delivery person brief access to the home to drop the package off inside the front door. And it turns out it is very safe. Amazon’s service actually verifies that the correct driver is in front of the correct home within the correct delivery time window prior to giving the delivery person a one-time encrypted authentication code to get into the home.

That service has since expanded to include in-car delivery.

There’s always going to be a little bit of an uneasiness around letting some stranger into your home, even if it’s just an arm inside the front door to leave a package. But if sacrificing a little bit of your personal boundaries means never having to worry about a package being stolen that would seem to be worth it, no?

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Rob Stott Author's page Rob is Editorial Director for CT Lab at NAPCO Media.