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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

No; at least per the providers, actual low-orbit satellite imagery is available to the (paying) public at 50cm resolution.

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It's available, but by far the actual high quality (<1m) data used/publicly available was taken by aircraft, not satellite.

This is usually a result of the data set already being paid for, either via the local assessor's office or the USDA. This doesn't mean it's always available for free, but that the economics means it's usually available for less than the actual cost.

That’s a little scary. If those covered the globe, you could see and track anyone anytime they left their house. This gets dystopian fast. Imagine the ad targeting. Or “sorry, we notice you haven’t been to the gym all month, we have raised your insurance premiums 10%”

You don't even need satellite to track people, the FBI has been getting really good results with a small fleet of Cessnas.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/02/fbi-surveill...

Not to mention you already carry a mobile phone with both Bluetooth and wifi turned on. You gym plus others knew you have not been there since February.

50cm is not really good to identify a person. And it's not real time at all. You'd be better off calling the gyms directly.

Google already knows this if you have an Android phone.

The temporal resolution isn't great, and you don't have much control over timing. Also 50cm is too coarse for much people-sized activity to be really identifying.

So; great for seeing how a property has been developed over time, not so great for seeing who is going the gym or not.

These scans don't update with much frequency.

That's like using Google Street View and noticing an unknown car in your driveway and assuming your partner is having an affair. Much more likely, the image is old, and that car belongs to the previous tenant.

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