Austrian postal service want's a key to your home

According to this article on “Der Standard” the Austrian postal service (“Österreichische Post AG” or ÖPAG for short) is working in cooperation with Nuki (a local company specialized in such systems) on offering delivery of packages directly into your home if you’re not there.

The idea here is that you attach an electronic lock to your normal front-door lock. When something should be delivered to you, the delivery person rings the bell as usual. If nobody answers, they can unlock the door and put the package on a special delivery mat.

Optionally, you will also be able to connect a special surveillance camera to the whole setup which should prevent abuse.

Back in 2017 Amazon announced their Key service which should do pretty much the same. Two years later they basically had to cancel that service due to various concerns according to The Verge and moved over to only delivering to your garage.

I don’t think that ÖPAG will do much better here. Why you would give a delivery person access to your home is beyond me. There are just so many aspects of that idea that make me cringe. Who is responsible that the camera only records if the door has been opened by the delivery service? Where are the recordings stored? Are there recordings? Are they admissible at a court if lock is abused? The camera is provided by the ISP A1, what if you are with some other ISP? What if I already have a Nuki lock? And these are just the questions I could come up in the first couple of minute.

While I personally think that the Austrian postal service is still the most reliable option where I live and I really like our delivery people here, I’ve had quite a few delivery issues in the past and also the organisation and customer service of ÖPAG is far from working flawlessly.

I would only give my very best friends a key to my apartment with the explicit agreement that they can only use it if I explicitly ask them to… A delivery service doesn’t came even remotely close to qualifying for the same level of trust.

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