Is Amazon watching you?

TL;DR: Amazon is rolling out smart glasses with cameras for its delivery drivers, which could be snapping photos every few seconds, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) says it’s starting to test dashcams on mail trucks. In other words, the two delivery services that show up at nearly every home in the US are adding cameras, just as surveillance tech faces growing backlash.

What happened: Amazon’s glasses, unveiled last fall, are meant to help reduce delivery errors by guiding drivers hands-free from van to doorstep—and more than 275,000 deliveries have already been made with them. The company wants 5,000 drivers wearing them by the end of this year and more than 20,000 by the end of 2027, and it’s hoping its eyewear reads less as “pervert glasses” and more as a helpful delivery gadget.

USPS is also getting in on the camera action: it’s testing dashcams on 100 mail trucks around the Washington DC area to spot road conditions and support “community safety.” The pilot was slated to start Sept. 21 and will run for several months.

Smile, you’re on delivery cam: Amazon says the glasses’ photos will feed an AI system to map neighborhoods, and it’ll blur people and vehicle license plates before humans review the images. What it won’t blur is the private property a driver passes on the way to your door. The dashcams on USPS trucks, made by dashcam company Nextbase, start recording as soon as a truck shifts into drive and run for a whole route, scanning everything from roads to sidewalks (they can capture license plates, though they apparently don’t run software to read them).

Destination unknown: Amazon will only use the collected data to “enhance the delivery process,” the exec leading the rollout told Bloomberg. But the company won’t say how long it keeps images, and a spokesperson later confirmed police can get them with a warrant. There’s no way to opt out, either (something the company hasn’t thought about, per the exec). And you won’t be able to see the photos it takes of your place, let alone ask for them to be deleted. USPS is just as vague—it hasn’t said who gets its footage (just USPS, or other government agencies, too?), or how long it’s stored.

Bottom line: Soon, something may be recording you every time a package shows up. But USPS hasn’t shown how its cameras make neighborhoods safer, and Amazon has yet to show how its glasses make deliveries better. Basically, the sentence of the week is “trust me, bro.” —LC