Do you want fotage of your 3 year old playing in an inflated pool in your back yard to end up on pedo.net because you didn't put a cammo net over your back yard?
Parrot drones are super fun, but it isn't hard to play with them responsibly.
I'm pretty sure your example is illegal under current laws. Photographing someone from afar doesn't require a drone. Replace "drone" with "telephoto lens" and you'll still draw the ire of law enforcement if you go around taking pictures of children in their back yards.
More importantly, "think of the children" is a common justification for bad laws. Human minds tend to give too much weight to low-probability stories. Nobody freaks out about the thousands of children who die every year from car accidents, but if a technology has the potential to take pictures of children surreptitiously they call for bans.
Drones are just like cars: people are going to be harmed by them, but the benefits are almost certainly greater than the costs. And that's before you consider how many applications for drones that we haven't yet thought of.
> Do you want fotage of your 3 year old playing in an inflated pool in your back yard to end up on pedo.net because you didn't put a cammo net over your back yard?
Where does one acquire such an extreme level of paranoia? I mean, seriously...
One word: paparazzi. They've rented helicopters to get pictures of weddings. Cheap and easy drones? They'll be hovering over every starlet's swimming pool attempting to get bikini pics. Private graveyard service? No worries, 10 drones hovering 10 feet above to capture the video of the grieving widow. What's to keep people from using drones to hover outside Donald Trump's windows 24/7 streaming views of his living room?
Sure, your average joe nobody is not likely to be targeted, but as the cost to acquire aerial video goes from $x,xxx an hour for a helicopter, to $x/hr for a drone, it will be used far more widely. In the past, it was prohibitively expensive and time consuming to do surveillance work. Now a smart phone with 4G tied to a balloon can stream HD feeds.
In the past, you had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage of your home. If drones can take high resolution photos (and video) from the air, this becomes null and void. I personally would prefer we have laws to protect privacy instead being forced to completely enclose all outdoor pools or risk showing up on poolperv.com's drone feeds. (Per my reading, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004 would not ban bathing suit video)
Follow politics close enough, each step the police gets better technology and so what used to be ok, like the police beeing able to follow a suspect ends up meaning that they can slap a cheap GPS tracker on any car, all without a warrent.
Of course it is admissible evidence when the police see you sell heroin on the street, it is a little different when that gets changed intro a drone that can watch entire neighborhoods from the air.
And when the police gets those rights, so will other people.
Fuck you. If you can come up with a problem that needs a law to protect people, you can come up with an example that doesn't consist of "Oh won't somebody think of the children"
Do you want fotage of your 3 year old playing in an inflated pool in your back yard to end up on pedo.net because you didn't put a cammo net over your back yard?
Parrot drones are super fun, but it isn't hard to play with them responsibly.