Assessing Privacy Concerns in Urban Air Mobility: A Parcel Delivery Case Study in Madrid

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers new opportunities for parcel delivery in metropolitan areas, but its success will depend on public acceptance. Among the societal challenges, privacy concerns represent a particularly sensitive issue that has received limited attention compared to noise or visual pollution. This paper applies privacy-related performance indicators, developed within the MUSE (Measuring U-space Social and Environmental Impact) project, to a simulated case study of parcel delivery in Madrid. Two operational concepts are analysed: free-route airspace and a grid-based network. The indicators capture the population potentially exposed to drone operations and provide a structured way to assess how different airspace designs influence privacy. The results show that the grid-based network consistently leads to higher exposure compared to the free-route concept. For individual trajectories, the number of affected people is more than doubled in the grid-based case. For aggregated traffic, the grid-based network yields approximately double the values during morning operations, while the difference is less pronounced during afternoon peaks. Given that results show grid-based networks may double privacy exposure, these findings highlight policy implications, calling for integration of privacy indicators, balanced altitude rules, and continuous monitoring in U-space regulation to ensure socially acceptable and sustainable UAM deployment.