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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

You are aware aerial photography is legal and common?

Right but what happens when you have coverage that is refreshed every hour or even less? You then have another surveillance network, one which is very hard to opt out of

I think we're way past that point already. Everyone with a phone already has their location tracked at least by their phone company. You might've even given it away to other companies willingly: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline.

I don't think there were that many unintended consequences from this tech. We got better traffic jam maps. And maybe a handful of criminals who forgot to leave their phone at home got caught.

I think this is one of those things that people growing up with the tech won't think anything of it (mom wants to always know your location) but old geezers will reminisce of a time where we still had to call a landline and talk a friend's parents first to see if they are home.

> I don't think there were that many unintended consequences from this tech.

Honestly the last time I saw a drone, the most annoying thing about it was its noise. I can't imagine them buzzing around all the time simply because of that.

You get at least as much noise from living in a city.

Yes, in some parts of cities, and not everyone lives or wants to live in a city.

Have you heard a drone? even tiny ones are loud as shit. some guy in my neighborhood flies his drone occasionally and it's super annoying. I can't imagine how annoying these giant drones delivering packages will be.

Have you heard a siren? They're intended to be loud.

> Have you heard a siren? They're intended to be loud.

They're also intended to do things like saving people's lives, not delivering their Amazon orders.

Ambulance and fire engine sirens; police not so much. But that really has no bearing on how loud they are.

Yes, I fly them professionally. The sound is related to the size, pitch, and profile of the propellers as well as the speed they are spinning.

The reason the guy down the street is probably loud is he is flying a race drone and hitting very high RPMs with it.

It seems that due to frangibility concerns, Project Wing uses much smaller motors and props now which requires a higher RPM to beat the air into submission.

The type of noise is completely different from a drone.

Agree, when developing technology,they need to think more about the impact on others.

They are. Frangibility was a huge part of the resulting design.

You might say _impact on others_ was one of the most important things they had to address with the FAA.

This was one of the leading complaints in the testing of Wing in Australia IIUC.

Delivery worked, but neighbors complained that the drones sounded like they were powered by the chained souls of the thousand hungry damned. They've apparently worked hard to get the sound down to a mere hundred hungry damned. ;)

They should work on getting some vibrato in there so they sound like angels instead. ;)

That's not what these particular aircraft are capable of.

The amount of public photography doubling over and over in an exponential increase of surveillance is a serious problem that cannot be dismissed with a simple "the act is legal and always has been".

In a legal studies class I took we compared two cases taking about (IRRC) unreasonable searches. In one, a police officer walking a beat saw some drugs/guns/etc. through a window and promptly got a warrant for a search. In another, the police "happened to be doing some aerial photography" over a weed farm and thence got a warrant etc. IIRC, the former was fine, the latter wasn't, basically because of the definitions of "ordinary" or something like that.

Obviously IAMNL, YMMV, etc., but the legal system does care about degree of normalcy.

Ps: if someone can better fill in the details I'm sure these are commonly studied cases and that I've butchered the facts. Please correct me!

Aerial imagery over a farm might be unusual, but it's common in urban environments.

https://www.appgeo.com/maps-pointers/google-now-selling-aeri...

Since around 2011 Google has been flying its own missions to collect 6 inch (15 cm) pixel imagery across the entire United States... goal is to have nationwide imagery that is no older than three years old everywhere, and to have imagery that is no older than one year in the largest metropolitan regions in the USA

Eagleview and Nearmap are other companies doing the same thing.

you sound like the NSA

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