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Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but wonder about the privacy implications of tech like this. I’m no fishing vessel, but I’m not that much smaller than some fishing vessels. Certainly my car is of comparable size. How long is it before humans can be tracked in, or out of, their cars, by anyone with a sufficiently adept satellite? That question also implies it isn’t already happening.

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It is really expensive to have satellites that can visually track a human. The Keyhole spy satellites are the size of Hubble (not coincidentally) and can resolve 3in. The much cheaper and smaller Planet Labs SkySat have resolution of 12in and could track a car.

The issue is that would need constellation covering the whole Earth. That is doable, but not needed for observation so nobody has done it. Ships have an empty background and can be tracked intermittently while people and cars require continuous tracking.

Drones would be better, but would still need a huge number to provide continuous tracking. CCTV cameras would be easiest but limited in area. Finally, tracking cell phones is doable, and easier to do with satellites.

As it is in Norway this is an ongoing debate - where the smaller fishing vessels have been exempt from having the mandatory AIS equipment, citing privacy as some of the reasons. In the government portal for showing AIS data they do not show data of ships that is below 45m length to preserve their privacy. However larger fishing vessels have large crews depending on the mode of fishing, so it becomes less a case of tracking single persons (and maybe in the fishermen more a case of tracking commercial competitors).

Companies like Persistent Surveillance Systems (https://www.pss-1.com/) have already been doing that since 2004.

Disclosure: I work for a satellite imagery company. As far as I know, our data is not usable for the level of tracking described in your comment. However, I likely have a personal bias towards data transparency. Opinions expressed are my own.

Pretty sure this can already happen.

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