Greg's Corner

Amazon now wants access into your car

Recently, it was announced that Amazon has started a new delivery program called Amazon Key in Car. It’s similar to their Amazon Key service which allows delivery people to leave your packages inside your house, except now deliveries are left in your car. Once again, Amazon is asking you to put a lot of trust in them for the sake of convenience.

This is an idea that Amazon has been toying with for some time now as previously they were said to be working with some kind of smart license plate holder in order to gain access to your car. However, Key In Car relies on existing service in order to open your car. In order to get Key In Car deliveries you need to have a late-model GM vehicle with the OnStar service or a Volvo with their On Call service. Of course, you’ll also need an Amazon Prime account and the service is only available in 37 cities so far.

While many people will no doubt consider Key In Car as a viable option for them, to me it seems like it has too many points of failure to be trustworthy, not to mention the privacy issues. In a lot of cases, cars can contain more personal information than homes as many of us spend an inordinate amount of time in our cars due to long commutes or other circumstances. That’s not even taking into account the information Amazon could gain access to through the OnStar and On Call services. We’re all up in arms about Facebook’s privacy leaks but since Amazon is sending us creature comforts we’re more than willing to give up our privacy.