It’s Time To Stop Worrying About ‘Peeping Drones’ — Here’s Why

(Source: Business Insider)

  Around 7:45 a.m. on June 22, a Seattle woman spotted an unusual apparatus hovering outside the window of her 26th floor apartment while getting dressed.

“It was freaky,” Lisa Pleiss told KIRO TV. “You don’t expect to be walking around indecent in your apartment and have this thing out there potentially recording you.”

She immediately called the concierge of her building, who went outside to see two men operating an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), more commonly known as a drone. They also had a tripod and video camera with them.

Twenty minutes later, the concierge “just wanted to make sure the Seattle Police were aware of the situation,” according to the official report.

Recently, police blotters across the country have told similar stories. On Sept. 8, Cleveland residents called the authorities after noticing a drone flying near their house. The same day, a woman in San Jose, California complained to police about a drone flying over her property, too. And just days earlier, New York City police arrested a man for allegedly flying a drone above the U.S. Open.

Private citizens have grown increasingly concerned that these technologies could invade their privacy.

“We already have laws to address if people are being spied upon,” prominent drone attorney Brendan Schulman tells Business Insider. “It doesn’t seem to me that the technology being used would make a difference.”

Schulman, a model aircraft enthusiast for over 20 years, recently represented a commercial drone operator who was fined by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In his opinion, almost every state already has laws that address spying — and almost no one flying drones uses them for that purpose anyway.

‘Drone Drama’

Two days after seeing the drone, Pleiss posted a “drone drama update” on her Facebook (found via The Washington Post). The machine’s owner had apparently contacted her and explained his company used it to photograph property for a new building. “He felt bad — assured me no topless pics exist,” she wrote.

Joe Vaughn, owner of Portland-based Skyris Imaging, an aerial photography, video, and GIS company, confirms he contacted Pleiss. In fact, he was one of the men outside her building that day.
“I called the Seattle Police department within 5 minutes of seeing an article on social media,” Vaughn tells Business Insider. “And then I Facebook messaged [Pleiss]. We spoke on the phone shortly after that.”

Vaughn says his operators never fly drones above private property. For that reason, they don’t do work for residential real estate companies either. “Chances are, you’re going to be flying over someone else’s home to get to another,” he explains.

Lastly, his operators never fly above 400 feet (per FAA regulations). The day Pleiss saw the drone, Vaughn remembers flying one of his devices, about 150 feet in the air, with a wide angle lens, to take a photo of the Seattle skyline for a client.

“If I were to point it at somebody’s window, I’d have to be within feet to see anything,” he explains.

While drones’ cameras do feed back to the operators, the low resolution, which only allows for navigation, distorts any specifics.

“Privacy has a lot to do with intent, and we weren’t intending to pry on anyone,” Vaughn says. “The equipment didn’t even have the ability to pry on anyone … I can understand how it would be startling though.”

Continue Reading at BusinessInsider.com…