Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Recognizing Threats, Defending Your Rights, and Protecting Your Family by Theresa M. Payton & Ted Claypoole

Author:Theresa M. Payton & Ted Claypoole [Payton, Theresa M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-01-15T14:00:00+00:00

Drones—When Cameras Fly Overhead

Most of us have times when we decide to be offline. We may blast our favorite song and dance like nobody’s watching. Unfortunately, someone might be watching after all through a hovering drone. Whether private or for law enforcement, drones carry cameras that now have incredible sound and audio quality and can spy on you through your windows and skylights. Anyone can buy a drone, or even create a simple homemade drone by connecting a smartphone or tablet to a model airplane. They can then fly while they spy, using simple apps that record pictures, videos, and audio, all silent and hard to detect. The legal system has not caught up with the technology. Law enforcement is still trying to understand how to govern drone flights and whether data acquired by them can be made public or used in criminal cases as evidence. Think of nonmilitary drones as flying computers, with every feature and functionality that you can imagine. Just like computers, drones can also be hacked, so it is vital there is a discussion about how data collected by drones is protected.

What altitude can they fly? What kind of facial recognition are they capable of at various activities? Can they take pictures of individuals through windows of their home? Drones are hard to spot for the untrained eye, so your ability to protect yourself is not great.

—US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California)[16]

While the fly time and audio and video quality of drones improve, the price is going down. This leads to concerns that need to be discussed in communities, both for legal proceedings and just as a general set of etiquette for good manners.

Citizens around the globe are asking whether or not the price of their privacy in the name of security is worth it. Just an hour’s drive outside of Denver, Colorado, in the town of Deer Trail, there is such grave concern over drones that the town’s leaders created a draft bill for hunting licenses to shoot drones for twenty-five dollars.[17] The draft said they would also offer a bounty of one hundred dollars for any unmanned drone shot down by its citizens. The draft bill is considered symbolic and a warning to government and nongovernment drone owners not to fly over Deer Trail. The Federal Aviation Administration, which has jurisdiction over airspace, has warned towns not to consider shooting down drones.[18]

Like it or not, unmanned systems are the future. Unfortunately we’re not ready for them—everything from our policy to our laws to the deep, deep ethical questions.

—Peter Singer, senior fellow at Brookings Institute[19],[20]

Here are some of the concerns ripe for community discussion:

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