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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

The FBI currently uses Helicopters and people generally don't complain about them violating their privacy. However, this may be because Helicopters are rather hard to miss if one is parked over your back-yard. Drones can be much smaller and quieter than any manned aircraft, and some even have the capability of entering buildings. In the near future we can expect drones the size of insects to enter use.

Suggestions:

1. A drone presence should be legally treated the same way as the presence of an FBI officer. Namely, to enter private premises they should require a warrant.

2. Legally require drones used in public spaces to be equipped with lights/speakers to make their presence as detectable as a helicopter. I'd rather not live in a society where insect-sized drones could be eavesdropping on any conversation or watching everything you do without your knowledge.

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#2 sounds like suggestions that electric car manufacturers have "fake engine sounds" coming out of speakers, so deaf people can hear the normally-silent car coming.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090921/0141396258.shtml

I think you mean blind people.

I think I meant "blind people" too.

I see what you did there.

Regarding 1, how high, vertically, does my private premises extend?

Is it the 500' described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights ?

No. Air rights extend only as high as the land owner reasonably uses. A landowner with a 3-story house has a rightful claim to higher airspace than a neighbor with a single story house. The specific height has not been determined in a courtroom, but it's likely to be a short distance (~10ft) above any structures on the property.

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

So, can a govt drone fly 100' over my house and photography me sunbathing nude in my fenced backyard?

In the U.S., the current legal precedent requires a warrant for aerial surveillance, independent of height. The exception to that rule would be during an active event -- like if a bank robber happened to be running through your neighborhood trying to get away.

According to the FAA, 1 inch. Remember the recent story of some schmuck piloting a quad-copter less than a foot from his neighbor's window? There was much arguing of whether said neighbor would be within rights to shoot the thing out of the air, and the HN consensus was, "nope".

So the drones should not be able to take picture of anything below 500 feet above ground without a warrant, but they could fly over 500 feet without taking pics/vid. OK?

I strongly agree with #1.

If you really don't want to live in a society with insect-sized drones doing, well, whatever they want, you're not going to have much choice in a couple of decades (at most).

#2 would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Enforcing things like #2 is what the press is for. Write a law, try to find instances of the authorities breaking it (or look for whistleblowers!), cause a stink. The difficulty of the second and third parts of that formula shouldn't be a reason to not write the law (presuming it's a good one).

...and then your car gets blown up, and they call it an "accident". The press is, and has been, the 4th branch of the government, so I would really hope that our last refuge isn't found on the pages of CNN.

You just need your own set of insect-sized drones to find and destroy other insect-sized drones.

This is a very Diamond Age notion.

(In Neal Stephenson's book, microscopic robots capable of everything from surveillance to entering humans and destroying them from within are an ever-present part of the atmosphere in parts of the earth. Many are there simply to hold the others in check. A fog sometimes results when a battle erupts between groups of drone owners.)

A balance of drones and anti-drones of increasingly smaller and harder to detect sizes does seem quite possible at this point. Certainly, drones are going to get progressively smaller and cheaper and could soon be used by practically anyone to spy on anyone else. Children's toys (e.g. RC helicopters with cameras) have already gone past a 1950's CIA agent's wildest dreams. Either anti-drone defenses are going to develop to keep pace or we're going to have to fundamentally change our notions surrounding privacy.

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