I'm not saying that this isn't a privacy issue it's just that the situation hasn't gotten appreciably worse because of this announcement.
Privacy exists in small pockets, and only in places that you control access to. Aside from that, you might as well consider it public.
Thanks to infrared photography, structure-penetrating radar, cell phones, etc., privacy no longer exists indoors either.
This is not right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
This means that police may not be able to routinely use imaging technologies, including active radars, to look through the walls of people's homes.
(Interestingly, this is a way in which police now have fewer powers than the general public, since in most places there are no laws preventing you as a civilian from using infrared imaging to look at someone's house.)
This is reality though. Our expectations of privacy must adjust to changes in technology.
Even when progress is, in your view, undesirable... our world isn't a private place anymore... our expectations of privacy will seem silly to future generations... its jus how things work. Right or wrong are abstract concepts, and the marching of time pays no attention to them.
People have expectations that the FDA will ensure the safety and efficacy of their medicines. Consequently, there are medications that I can't have in the US because of the law.
People have expectations of a level of safety on the highways. The technology under the hood of my car allows me to reach speeds of at least 100, and the law effectively prevents me from using it.
There are many ways in which people have expectations that technology could subvert. Automatically changing our expectations to allow for any technologically possible breach of those expectations isn't currently the way we do things.
One could even make it shielded against electromagnetic frequencies. No more drones hacking your wifi!
Yes, well-placed trees, plants, and some lattice material.
I once visited the roof of the Limn building on Townsend in San Francisco. It turns out there was a lush garden, nice eating areas, and an Airstream trailer, all on the roof. Absolutely none of it was visible from the ground, and you'd be lucky to make out much of anything from overhead.
I'm pretty certain that a company paying a team of photographers to stalk the average citizen to psychoanalyze their world would be creepy, if not illegal. But this is exactly what they will be doing—and we'll have no ability to "outrun" their team of photographers. Technically, we won't even know when they're overhead.
And that does bother me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements
Other countries have done this for years, and cover their equipment with camo cover when opposing country assets are overhead. This is why the Air Force/Boeing X-37B is such a big deal; its an asset that can shift orbits to counterattack known orbit information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/X_37B_Gets_Stranger_999.ht...