Mateusz Dulski

English 1101

Ph.D. Melina Martin

5/08/2017

Privacy at risk.

"Should You Be Allowed to Prevent Drones From Flying Over Your Property?" That

question is more complex than anybody could think at the beginning. This is not just about

drones, it is about the concept of human privacy. "Privacy is not something that can be

counted, divided or "traded", as Gleick cites Vaidhyanathan in his article. It is about crossing

the limits of privacy and the enormous level of surveillance in our daily lives. Drones flying

over somebody's property are just one of many privacy debate issues that multiply along with

the impact of big corporations and today's technological progress. It is not an exaggeration to

say that drones can be not only the privacy threat but physical danger as well. Drone

technology simply does not provide enough benefits for most average citizens which could

encourage property owners to consider publicly accessible legalization of drones use over

their land. Spreading the use of drones over private properties will increase the level of

surveillance of people's daily lives even more. And lastly, ethics and privacy laws are not able

to keep up with current technology. Drones should not be allowed to fly over private

properties because they are a threat to people's privacy and safety.

Froomkin in the article "Should You Be Allowed to Prevent Drones From Flying Over

Your Property?" writes himself: "Property rights in the curtilage include the right to sell the

land and, crucially, the right to exclude others". According to his position, flying a drone

over private land is equivalent with trespassing it by the operator himself. This seemingly

harmless looking toy may be more dangerous than an intruder stepping on personal

property. Therefore, every drone flying over private area without permission of the
landowner should be promptly reported to prevent the possible threat. Drones can film,

record sounds, and nothing can protect them from people's land. Froomkin points out that

every time one see a drone in the air he will have a reason to fear about spying or crashing

itself.. For an average citizen, an agreement for drones flying over private possessions brings

more troubles than benefits. Who is the most interested in getting a drone's use permission?

The one who has the most to gain and what it really means, to earn. Property owners in this

setting most likely would become victims when shareholders will make profits and benefit at

the expense of citizens privacy. Froomkin recalls that Government, Police and big companies

are the biggest stakeholders for whom the abolition of the ban would give almost unlimited

room for further maneuvers.

People have justifiable fear about the power and intentions that go along with new

inventions which are typically portrayed as those that make life easier for us.

Not all things turn out to be what everyone sees in them. For most people, Google is just a

search engine. Few, however, are concerned about the fact which Gleick is describing in his

article "How Google Dominates Us." He states, "[S]ubstantial portion of the worlds printed

books have now been copied onto the companys servers, where they share space with

millions of hours of video and detailed multilevel imagery of the entire globe, from satellites

and from its squadrons of roving street-level cameras." Google owners would probably have

nothing against about adding to their repertoire the data collected by drones marked with the

Googles logo. This is for example, one of the potential companies that would benefit a lot

from reduction of privacy rights related to drones use. Any privacy that we still have is under

question already. And one of the major problems is that it becomes a norm at the source itself.

As Levy says: "Google [] seemed to have a blind spot regarding the consequences of its

own technology on privacy and property rights." The same thing can be relative to the drones

use issue. Something that theoretically is meant to bring advantages can possibly become a
threat to privacy and turn into "money machine" for big players. Solove in "The end of

privacy?" mentions how credit-card purchases, Internet surfing and television watching data

is collected and used by companies. Government track our private data to search for

suspicious patterns of behavior. Drones controlling people from the air is just another step.

Solove draws attention that the U.S has less stringent privacy laws than do many other

countries. With such an advanced technique, it is not difficult to overuse peoples privacy

rights.

"[T]echnology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor." Gleick

states in his previously mentioned article about Google. Solove makes related point: Today

collecting personal information has become second nature. More and more people have cell

phones cameras, digital audio recorders, Web cameras and other recording technologies that

readily capture details about their lives." At that time, Solove was probably thinking about

incredibly fast-growing Internet popularity and its possible threat to privacy due to its ability

to spread the information worldwide. It is been almost a decade since Daniel Solove wrote

this in his article but the points that he mentions do not differ very much from those which

are listed in the debate about the use of drones. "With the Internet, anybody can reach a

global audience." Indicate Solove in 2008. "[Y]ou could be spied on by anyone with a few

hundred dollars and a voyeuristic streak." Says Froomkin in 2016. Every day people post

more than sixty-five thousand videos on YouTube, as shows data in Solove's article.

According to Froomkin, there is a prediction of 7 million drones flying by 2020. By assuming

that every drone is equipped with a camera, taking into account these statistics and how the

information is spread in the network, it is not difficult to imagine what can happen when

every operator will have the freedom to fly over private properties.

Ryan Calo is a person who presents counterarguments to the Froomkins position. For

him, preventing drones from flying over private properties is the way to kill innovation. It has
to be admitted that he presents some reasonable advantages of drones use. Yes, they are next

frontier in aviation and yes, companies will be able to deliver goods faster. But is it really

worth putting a significant part of our privacy at risk? Technological progress is great but it

always carries a risk of threat by those who use it with unethical intentions. At this moment, it

is close to impossible to regulate and verificate use of every drone in order to eliminate

potential threats. What about the spies that could possibly monitor people presence at home

and then use it for planning robberies? In todays world the most dangerous weapon can turn

out to be a keyboard, so also drones perceived as a threat are not necessarily science fiction.

However, the truth is that sometimes help of a drone technology in particular situations may

be priceless. These cases are, for example, locating a missing child or someone who poses a

danger.

Considering the above examples of positive use of drones in special circumstances, it

shows us that the problem of using drones is not either-or dilemma and there are particular

circumstances which justify in some way the use of drones in private property. There are

qualifiers that make drones use sometimes acceptable in limited law-enforcement and

military purposes, but still in most of other cases drones use will probably cause privacy

violations. Popularity of public sharing people's everyday life can affect current perception of

privacy, but it does not mean that privacy rights have disappeared. "You already have zero

privacy. Get over it." - as Solove cites Scott McNealy in his article, but there is still more

privacy that can be taken from people and it is still possible to prevent that happening.
 Works cited

Gleick, James. "How Google Dominates Us." The New York Review of Books. N.p., n.d. Web.

07 May 2017.

Solove, Daniel J. "The end of privacy?" Scientific American 299.3 (2008): 101+. Academic

OneFile. Web. 7 May 2017.

Froomkin, A. Michael. Calo, Ryan. "Should You Be Allowed to Prevent Drones From Flying

Over Your Property?" The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 22 May 2016.

Web. 07 May 2017.