Joel Reidenberg was quoted in Business Insider about privacy issues surrounding new package delivery programs by online retail companies that will allow delivery people to drop off packages inside homes.
This new convenience could be a bit of a double-edged sword, however, according to privacy expert Joel Reidenberg, a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law and the director of the school’s center on law and information privacy.
“It certainly raises privacy concerns, an unknown person coming into your home,” he said.
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In both services, the delivery person has to request entry or obtain a unique code for entry. Should anything go wrong while the delivery person is in the house, the perpetrator could be immediately identified.But if your privacy is violated in this situation — say, you watched the delivery person go through some private papers you left out — you probably wouldn’t have many options to do anything about it.
“The likelihood is the terms of service … will deny liability for anything that happens in the context of delivery. So if a delivery person violates the homeowner’s privacy while they’re in the home, there’s pretty much no recourse that homeowner has for that privacy violation,” Reidenberg said.
The technology would be able to tell you who violated your privacy and how, and that would likely be enough to get the delivery person fired. Legal action would be more difficult, however.
“Somebody looking around the house — what’s the provable harm they’d be able to show? Would they really want to bring a lawsuit costing $50,000 to get in the courthouse door to sue the delivery person because they snooped in the house? That’s not gonna happen,” Reidenberg said.
… Delivery into the home is just one way that Walmart and Amazon are rethinking ways of getting packages into customers’ hands as the battle for online dollars heats up between the two retail giants.For Reidenberg, at least, there are still some concerns about this particular model.
He said: “It’s a trade-off: which is worse, the porch pirate or the risk that the delivery person might do something in the house?”