Drones With an Eye on the Public Cleared to Fly

Re:Drones With an Eye on the Public Cleared to Fly by pash on Saturday February 18, 2012 @11:58AM (#3606960)

Authorizing drones to fly in US airspace is hardly insanity. There are lots of commercial (and hobbyist) uses for drones, and I think it's great that there will soon be a way to pursue them legally.

There are obvious concerns about the the use of drones by law enforcement, etc., but those can and should be dealt with separately. You don't control abusive surveillance by banning technologies, whether that be drones or cameras or microphones or GPS radios or whatever. You control abusive surveillance by banning particular uses of those technologies, particularly by the state.

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Re:Drones With an Eye on the Public Cleared to Fly by ck2 on Saturday February 18, 2012 @12:35PM (#3607081)

In a decade when there is a google map for your entire year of travel that is public to the world, that you did not authorize but have no way to stop, we'll see how you feel about this.

There is zero overhead to running 1000 drones over a city once they get the technology right. Neighbors will be spying on neighbors in every detail.

Good luck closing the door on privacy once it's blasted open like this.

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Re:Drones With an Eye on the Public Cleared to Fly by barefoot on Saturday February 18, 2012 @09:22PM (#3608435)

This data is already being collected (anonymously) to some extent:

http://www.skyhookwireless.com/location-intelligence/

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Re:Drones With an Eye on the Public Cleared to Fly by tripzilch on Saturday February 18, 2012 @04:09PM (#3607761)

Assuming that your law enforcement's usage of drones will be "dealt with separately" (quite an assumption if you ask me--they're already doing it), you can bet there'll be some loophole so they can gather data from commercial drones.

If not by straight out hiring them, they will just subpoena for their data.

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