Building Trust with a Mobile Application for Last-Mile Commercial Drone Delivery

A common set of problems faced by commercial delivery companies are to find ways to increase the efficiency and reliability of the "last mile" of a package's journey, all while reducing operating costs. This has driven many companies to start exploring using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, as a means to get packages to their final destination. While UAVs have a great potential to help increase efficiency in commercial package delivery, this comes at a potential cost of the privacy of people intersecting the flight paths of these unmanned vehicles. This paper explores public user perception of the expected privacy that a mobile phone application for commercial delivery drones could offer, in order to determine what privacy measures should be implemented to engender trust in unmanned delivery platforms. We found that for a commercial drone delivery system to be adopted by the general public, safety and privacy risks remain one of the biggest hurdles for trust and acceptance, and we found evidence that a user-centered mobile application could increase trust in commercial drone flights.