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A drive-through for your groceries: According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, that's one of Amazon's many ambitions for the next version of its grocery-delivery service, Fresh. The company will set up a series of "convenience stores," the Journal reports, where it will sell basic goods like milk, produce, and meat.
Some locations will also allow people to pick up orders they placed online. Here's how the Journal described that feature:
For customers seeking a quicker checkout, Amazon will soon begin rolling out designated drive-in locations where online grocery orders will be brought to the car, the people said. The company is developing license-plate reading technology to speed wait times.
That detail about the license-plate readers caught my attention. Scanning the license plates of incoming cars makes sense: If your plate is connected to your Amazon account, the system could alert employees working in the store that you've arrived to pick up your grocery order before you even have a chance to park. If someone met you at the curb with your order in hand, you could be in and out of the lot in less than a minute.
But that's not the only reason implementing a license-plate system would be a smart move for Amazon. If the company can convince you to tell it which car is yours, it could link your license plate number to your Amazon account. Then, if it bought data from another company that shows where else your car has traveled, it could potentially use that information to develop an even more complete picture of your habits, preferences, and personality.
My state has a variety of specialty license places available for an extra ~$35 year, one of them has black text on a dark purple background. I picked that plate in order to reduce the accuracy of scanners trying to read my license plate. What other methods have people come up with?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @06:53PM
I'm sure there aren't many variants of that plate around. After 2 times of someone reporting someone else with "a plate with just Z's and 2's", it's pretty easy to know that "oh, it's that same idiot again". Having a plate like that makes you stand out more, not less.
If you want to stand out more, just get a non-vanity plate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @08:13PM
Human identification isn't the threat scenario here. Its automation. And computers don't generally distinguish between vanity plates and standard-issue plates. But Zs, 7s and 2s are similar enough to introduce errors in the OCR software that parses plate scans.