> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening.
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
The problem is that police misuse every single power they have been given and public trust is very low for years now.
I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.
What made the police think they were “suspicious”? Anybody can be suspicious if you want to tail them for another reason. When you leave the judgement entirely to the person who gets to initiate the surveillance, then you are saying anyone can be surveilled.
> Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”
They should have never been deployed to begin with.
How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.
That they're well aware of the well-attested and evidenced prejudices within society in the wide, and law enforcement in the narrow, that are sadly still prevalent in the USA?
What does your oddly aggressive reply say about you? Other than your username is at best, aspirational, and good luck with that.
It's important to be aware of how unjust an organization who's origins are groups that hunt for escaped slaves is, and how fucked up the way they treat black people is to this very day.
My dad grew up in a rural village, and my wife grew up in a very small rural town. Both have mentioned to me that, in such places, people can see and keep track of basically everything that's going on in public spaces anyway. Drone surveillance can be viewed as replicating the oversight that exists in Mayberry in a large city.
I don’t think I have a problem with drones. There is a line to be drawn regarding auditing access of footage and how we are analyzing it historically (prevent from misusing the tech) but for things like active reporting it has the potential to be pretty helpful. Cops used to be a lot more visible (or maybe greater in number) and this type of tech has the potential to help get that back.
I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.
I really don’t agree. Especially in this day where anyone, or any business could run it all through AI and profile everyone to work out the exact best moment to send you a push notification for a Big Mac or whatever.
And this is the perfect demonstration of what why police shouldn’t have access to this technology.
Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
This surveillance tech is a band-aid on the effects of crime rather than a solution to the root cause.
So you catch the criminals and put them in jail. Then what? What prevents more people from resorting to crime? What prevents recidivism?
Our government as a whole should reduce crime by performing the most effective crime reduction strategies: eliminating the tuition cost of education, ending poverty [1] and disastrously high income inequality, implementing strong universal healthcare [2], reforming the prison system so that it provides opportunities to rehabilitate rather than raw punishment, enshrining employee protections like paid family leave into law so that kids can be raised by their family rather than being under-supervised while their parents work two shifts a day.
[1] With the excess wealth the US generates, ending poverty is trivial. Suggested Google search: “daily cost of Iran war.”
We know that you don't need expansive welfare to reduce crime, because poor countries generally aren't plagued with crime. Brazil's homicide rate is 10x as high as Bangladesh's, even though Brazil has about 4x the average income.
Most people don't "resort to crime" because they lack necessities. They do it due to a confluence of socialization, cognitive factors, and opportunity to get away with crime.
I think this is basically a cherry-picking and oversimplification of the situation.
For one thing, income inequality in Brazil is significantly higher than in Bangladesh.
Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
> Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
That doesn't matter. If crime is caused by poverty, like you hypothesize, then poor countries like Bangladesh should have astronomical crime rates. But they don't.
> Do not travel to the Chittagong Hill Tracts due to unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping. This area includes Khagrachari, Rangamati, and Bandarban Hill Tracts districts. Do not travel to this area for any reason.
I think I agree. I think this is the type of data that should be able to be requested (and given if the context is correct) but not simply freely out there. Some third party commercial party will just use and abuse it.
I think the value of having the data on public spaces publicly available far outweighs the risk of privately held data, or editorializaed data from public spaces.
Also: You're welcome to disable push notifications if you don't want a big mac ad. (I agree that advertising is a cancer.)
Also, 2: What right should the government have to capture public data and then keep it from the public?
The government is different from a person. I’m ok with cctv being recorded and stored for x days with protocols and laws that restrict who can access it and for what purposes. With audit logs and penalties for misuse.
The idea of Meta being able to track my every move creeps me the fuck out, sorry.
What right does the government have to give my data to randos? The public that's captured is not the same as the public that accesses the data. Just imagine the creepy implications.
Imagine what stalkers could do if they could follow a woman's every movement. Imagine robbers staking out houses from the comfort of their couch.
The government has an obligation to protect the data it has on its citizens, not to just give out willy-nilly. By your logic, public hospitals should share your medical files publicly.
The solution would be for less data to be collected in the first place, not to make the data leak as dystopian as possible.
-Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
-Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
-Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
-I agree that it would be a better world if there were no drone surveillance, however, in a world where there is drone surveillance--i.e., the world in which we exist--I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
> -Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
I've gone through great lengths to ensure it can't, I'd rather not have the government undo all that effort.
> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it for you and send you a nice notification.
> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
I'd modify this to "all warrantless surveillance", so not just cameras. Warrantless surveillance should not be allowed for private activity, and making it public helps audit that.
> In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.”
In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.
That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
Scale. The possibility of surveillance was far less worrying when three police officers had to tail you, because they'd only expend that effort when they were pretty sure you'd done a crime.
So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians? I'd rather a drone follows the car until it stops and the police arrive to retrieve it and give a hand slap to the offender.
I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
> So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians?
Yes, this is preferable to me when compared to a society where police can surveil everyone, everywhere for no crime at all. I don't want to sit on my roof listening to music and wonder how many police drones are watching me, trying to figure out if I'm a "prowler." I don't want to be followed by a police drone while I'm on my way to the basketball court to shoot hoops with my friend, simply because the police thought one of us looked like a "suspicious individual."
> I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
Constraints can be good when they constrain both sides. E2EE chat protocols are good even though they effectively prohibit large groups, because they also prohibit intermediaries from reading your chats.
>the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be.
>If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent
I would rather live in a world with marginally higher petty crime rates with zero surveillance, than a world that has no petty crime but where there are Flock cameras on every corner and drones patrolling overhead at all times.
I agree with you 100% if the number of average drone surveillance incidents per year stays the same as the average number of high speed chases per year that took place before drones.
This is a very common position. But I’ve never understood the argument that police should have to do some amount of busywork for things to be fair.
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
It's because ignoring rights happens faster than they can be protected.
Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.
Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.
I mean, helicopters are a limited and expensive resource.
And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap
I believe in a "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard. A drone could hover outside my window watching me, but I don't think that would make people feel comfortable.
Per the article, that doesn't appear to be the use case.
> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
> SFPD’s drone policy says operators must keep cameras trained on areas necessary to a mission and minimize the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people or places. It also instructs operators to take reasonable precautions, including turning cameras away, to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the exposed Skydio feeds reviewed by WIRED showed full missions from takeoff to landing, capturing not only detentions and searches, but also streets, apartment buildings, rooftops, cars, courtyards, and bystanders who did not appear to be the subject of any police operation.
Sounds like they're saying we should be appalled by this usage of drones... IDK, until we have some proof of an truly innocent (found by a court) or no reason to be suspected person (eg profiled, misidentified) having a bad outcome (such as arrest and long detention) without recourse (sue the crap out of the city, dept, or state) ...
This article basically reads as "Drones help police apprehend a man involved with auto theft" ...
The only "news" here (no shocker) is that the PD is somewhat ignorant on how to handle these new technologies securely. They need to go out on the open market and hire some of the best and brightest security folks displaced by Mythos (that's a joke), and secure their stuff with the basics.
nah, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is IMO until the police have something to hide (besides their crappy securing of the usage) It's not really a news piece.
If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.
What I don't care so much about the data collection as I do about how it's used.
Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).
In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
> Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).
The police are doing these things too (stalking girlfriends, viewing cameras, following people).
> In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
The article lists several cases where they weren't being used in an "excellent manner." They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside. The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
And these are just the instances the investigators were able to find, on the five drones that had a public link to their footage. Footage that only dates back six months. How many more drones does SFPD have that weren't included in the archive? How many more unexcellent uses did the investigators miss because the footage expired?
+1. I think having cameras is good. In this case these are active calls and it’s great for all parties. How it’s used after the fact is what matters imo.
I could even get comfortable with tech like Flock if it was not so ripe for abuse.
Civilized countries do have limited rights to privacy in public. For example, it may be illegal to publish a photograph of a person without their consent.
I think there is a valid discussion for devices like Flock. The CEO is a detriment to their company and the lack of police guardrails and auditing make it ripe for abuse.
Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.
I remember reading this excellent article on Bloomberg about a guy who started a company that uses Cessna's with high-quality cameras, and they fly over an area for hours, and then use that footage to rollback crimes.
They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.
It was really fascinating… In 2016.
At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.
Here is a RadioLab podcast [0] about the system from company Persistent Surveillance Systems [1].
An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).
I think they also use planes with state of the art optics and cameras in other major US cities, especially before certain events, to go back in time later. If a crime happens they can trace back cars and suspects in the video archive. And I guess they might also do number plate recognition by default, to get even quicker results.
Same as ALPRs and anything else related to policing.
We need protections/limits in place. But we also need a government that's reliable and "friendly" (to the extent a large government can be). We currently don't, so all these new techs are quite concerning.
Sad to see. Here in Europe it's definitely not any better. Despite the GDPR’s safeguards, tech surveillance is set to become one of the defining civil liberties battlegrounds in across the World. Even with the EU AI act, the people of europe are significantly at risk.
Wait until you find out what the EU want/have asked the GAM trio of big tech corps to do to your phone and private messaging platforms. (Coincidentally they suddenly don't think so big an anti competition problem exists anymore).
This article literally documents several times SFPD used drones to surveil people who weren't committing any crimes. They sent their drones to spy on a guy who was sitting on a roof listening to music, and in another instance they sent drones to follow "suspicious individuals" who were just going to a basketball court to shoot hoops.
This is done despite the department's drone policy stating that "drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises."
There should be no optimization on police resources. When Katz v. USA (no expectation of privacy in public) was decided, surveillance was done by an officer who needed to be paid a middle class salary, maybe armed with a camera and a telephoto lens if we’re lucky. The average city police department barely knew what SIGINT meant.
Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.
These drones are “piloted” but it can be in a semiautonomous way. Your argument makes sense for Flock cameras but not for this style of drone. I think first response with a drone to an active call is a great use of resources for all parties. Flock cameras constantly tracking every movement, probably not given the severe lack of audits and guardrails.
Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only. Can you describe how this breaks the 4th? Does it really matter if it’s a human tracking down a suspect or a drone.
If you have any case law that shows general cameras break the 4th I would love to read.
> Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only.
I'm the person who posted the article lol. Which makes this deeply ironic because it's clear you didn't read it, otherwise you would know that the article lists several cases where the drones were used to investigate random people – not active calls. They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside.
The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
> Can you describe how this breaks the 4th?
Put me on the Supreme Court and I'd be happy to do that for you. Until then, there are more qualified people to do it and the rest of us will just know it when we see it. :)
Yup I did and it was not clear. I think those two examples are worthy of a discussion on scope creep but not clear policy violations atm. The intent is to be used on active calls which I believe is a great idea. A clear violation would be the drones actively patrolling and identify suspicious behavior. That’s bad and a clear violation of the policy.
Please let us know how this violates the 4th. I would love to learn more about it.
This is one of those areas that can be a slippery slope. Look at the UK and the terrible state it’s in. On the flip side I would hope that so long as the guardrails are in place that first response drones can be good for all parties.
Maybe similar trajectory but fundamentally Chatrie is about compelling stored data from a third party. I don’t believe there is any meaningful overlap between that and direct visual observation from police. Folks should argue it in court if so but I don’t see the link to 4th violations.
> Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct “retrospective[ly],” and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling “tireless and absolute surveillance” of any number of people in any number of places.
A certain level of drone surveillance would seem likely to rise to this level of intrusion, and I think ALPR cameras already do.
Agree I wish the article focused more on the storage and availability of the data instead of the narrative they wrote. It’s in there but not the focus which imo is the issue. I think it’s great to have the drones as active response but like ALPR, it’s ripe for abuse after the fact. These systems can have great value but are ripe for abuse, I hope organizations catchup to build the proper guardrails.
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
See also "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime"
The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to
wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the
conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an
investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a
shady character.
So these are only being used on active calls. As I have said else where there is a line to draw on active calls and data mining. Having an eye on the sky for an active calls is a pretty nice use of resources and serves all parties. I am a big proponent that body cams should be required to be on for all calls.
Not going to dig in either of those links because I suspect they go down the data mining route more like a flock less about active calls. If you would like to point out why these are bad for active calls I am all ears.
> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
https://archive.is/dychh
I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening.
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
Part of the problem is it leads to stuff like this:
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
Or this: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgia-deputy-charged-with...
Or this: https://fox11online.com/news/crime/tehrangi-chapman-milwauke...
Or this: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/10/pasadena...
The problem is that police misuse every single power they have been given and public trust is very low for years now.
I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.
What made the police think they were “suspicious”? Anybody can be suspicious if you want to tail them for another reason. When you leave the judgement entirely to the person who gets to initiate the surveillance, then you are saying anyone can be surveilled.
No drone has ever followed me when I am on the way to go play hockey.
How would you know? From the article:
> Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”
Yet.
I mean, they evaluated and left?
What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
They should have never been deployed to begin with.
How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.
They didn't do anything to even be "evaluated", but you already knew that...
I can't help but wonder what skin color those young men had that made the police suspicious in the first place...
You're the one bringing up skin color, what does that say about you.
That they're not willfully blind to the reality we live in?
That they're well aware of the well-attested and evidenced prejudices within society in the wide, and law enforcement in the narrow, that are sadly still prevalent in the USA?
What does your oddly aggressive reply say about you? Other than your username is at best, aspirational, and good luck with that.
That I'm aware of how big of a problem racial discrimination is in policing?
> Black Californians are more than twice as likely to be searched as white Californians, at about 20 percent versus 8 percent of all stops
https://www.ppic.org/publication/racial-disparities-in-law-e...
You'll get people going "well that's because they do more crimes" to this.
IMO, the toughest study to argue with is https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/05/veil-darkness-redu...
They studied traffic stops around the daylight savings transition, which is a perfect natural control for "could the cops see the car occupants?"
When DST switches, the on-paper racial disparity moves by an hour. The Earth's orbit, obviously, does not.
Well, everyone knows white boys can’t jump.
That says a lot about you, frankly.
Thanks!
It's important to be aware of how unjust an organization who's origins are groups that hunt for escaped slaves is, and how fucked up the way they treat black people is to this very day.
With mass drone surveillance and online safety acts, we will finally be able to keep our children truly safe for the small cost of privacy.
My dad grew up in a rural village, and my wife grew up in a very small rural town. Both have mentioned to me that, in such places, people can see and keep track of basically everything that's going on in public spaces anyway. Drone surveillance can be viewed as replicating the oversight that exists in Mayberry in a large city.
"We're bringing the paranoid old biddy HOA worldview to everyone, non-consensually!" is your upside?
It's less like HOA and more like sharia law if I remember his background correct.
People generally recognize Mayberry as the ideal of where to live.
People generally recognize there isn't a universal ideal place to live, because people are often different.
Some people leave the rural paniopticon where half of the dating pool are cousins for a reason, for example.
Why'd your Dad leave?
Now that's what we call bait
And a couple of ES-209s as well
To balance it, the police need to be extremely accountable, but so far they get away with murder pretty easily...so...
I believe the post was intended to be ironic, implying that privacy isn't really a small cost.
I don’t think I have a problem with drones. There is a line to be drawn regarding auditing access of footage and how we are analyzing it historically (prevent from misusing the tech) but for things like active reporting it has the potential to be pretty helpful. Cops used to be a lot more visible (or maybe greater in number) and this type of tech has the potential to help get that back.
I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.
All camera footage should be publicly available.
I really don’t agree. Especially in this day where anyone, or any business could run it all through AI and profile everyone to work out the exact best moment to send you a push notification for a Big Mac or whatever.
And this is the perfect demonstration of what why police shouldn’t have access to this technology.
Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
This surveillance tech is a band-aid on the effects of crime rather than a solution to the root cause.
So you catch the criminals and put them in jail. Then what? What prevents more people from resorting to crime? What prevents recidivism?
Our government as a whole should reduce crime by performing the most effective crime reduction strategies: eliminating the tuition cost of education, ending poverty [1] and disastrously high income inequality, implementing strong universal healthcare [2], reforming the prison system so that it provides opportunities to rehabilitate rather than raw punishment, enshrining employee protections like paid family leave into law so that kids can be raised by their family rather than being under-supervised while their parents work two shifts a day.
[1] With the excess wealth the US generates, ending poverty is trivial. Suggested Google search: “daily cost of Iran war.”
[2] Doesn’t even cost money, it saves money.
We know that you don't need expansive welfare to reduce crime, because poor countries generally aren't plagued with crime. Brazil's homicide rate is 10x as high as Bangladesh's, even though Brazil has about 4x the average income.
Most people don't "resort to crime" because they lack necessities. They do it due to a confluence of socialization, cognitive factors, and opportunity to get away with crime.
I think this is basically a cherry-picking and oversimplification of the situation.
For one thing, income inequality in Brazil is significantly higher than in Bangladesh.
Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
> Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
That doesn't matter. If crime is caused by poverty, like you hypothesize, then poor countries like Bangladesh should have astronomical crime rates. But they don't.
https://travel.state.gov/en/international-travel/travel-advi...
> Travel advisory - People's Republic of Bangladesh: Level 3 - Reconsider travel
And a little spot of Level 4:
> Do not travel to the Chittagong Hill Tracts due to unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping. This area includes Khagrachari, Rangamati, and Bandarban Hill Tracts districts. Do not travel to this area for any reason.
I think I agree. I think this is the type of data that should be able to be requested (and given if the context is correct) but not simply freely out there. Some third party commercial party will just use and abuse it.
Ok, thats simple: no commercial use licensing. This already exists, via various copyleft mechanisms.
And very easy to ignore. Not an easy solve.
Once the cat is out of the bag you cannot put it back. Similar to how LLMs have massive training sets on copyright material.
I think the value of having the data on public spaces publicly available far outweighs the risk of privately held data, or editorializaed data from public spaces.
Also: You're welcome to disable push notifications if you don't want a big mac ad. (I agree that advertising is a cancer.)
Also, 2: What right should the government have to capture public data and then keep it from the public?
The government is different from a person. I’m ok with cctv being recorded and stored for x days with protocols and laws that restrict who can access it and for what purposes. With audit logs and penalties for misuse.
The idea of Meta being able to track my every move creeps me the fuck out, sorry.
What right does the government have to give my data to randos? The public that's captured is not the same as the public that accesses the data. Just imagine the creepy implications.
Imagine what stalkers could do if they could follow a woman's every movement. Imagine robbers staking out houses from the comfort of their couch.
The government has an obligation to protect the data it has on its citizens, not to just give out willy-nilly. By your logic, public hospitals should share your medical files publicly.
The solution would be for less data to be collected in the first place, not to make the data leak as dystopian as possible.
-Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
-Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
-Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
-I agree that it would be a better world if there were no drone surveillance, however, in a world where there is drone surveillance--i.e., the world in which we exist--I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
> -Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
I've gone through great lengths to ensure it can't, I'd rather not have the government undo all that effort.
> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it for you and send you a nice notification.
> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
I'd modify this to "all warrantless surveillance", so not just cameras. Warrantless surveillance should not be allowed for private activity, and making it public helps audit that.
> In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.”
In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.
That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
Helicopters already exist, and so do consumer drones - so why is this an issue?
Scale. The possibility of surveillance was far less worrying when three police officers had to tail you, because they'd only expend that effort when they were pretty sure you'd done a crime.
So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians? I'd rather a drone follows the car until it stops and the police arrive to retrieve it and give a hand slap to the offender.
I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
> So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians?
Yes, this is preferable to me when compared to a society where police can surveil everyone, everywhere for no crime at all. I don't want to sit on my roof listening to music and wonder how many police drones are watching me, trying to figure out if I'm a "prowler." I don't want to be followed by a police drone while I'm on my way to the basketball court to shoot hoops with my friend, simply because the police thought one of us looked like a "suspicious individual."
> I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
People will shoot themselves in the foot if it means criminals get harsher punishments, sometimes literally.
Constraints can be good when they constrain both sides. E2EE chat protocols are good even though they effectively prohibit large groups, because they also prohibit intermediaries from reading your chats.
>the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be.
>If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent
I would rather live in a world with marginally higher petty crime rates with zero surveillance, than a world that has no petty crime but where there are Flock cameras on every corner and drones patrolling overhead at all times.
Peter Thiel and his ilk are creating Big Brother.
I agree with you 100% if the number of average drone surveillance incidents per year stays the same as the average number of high speed chases per year that took place before drones.
This is a very common position. But I’ve never understood the argument that police should have to do some amount of busywork for things to be fair.
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
It's because ignoring rights happens faster than they can be protected.
Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.
Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.
I mean, helicopters are a limited and expensive resource.
And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap
At least, that’s what I’ve gathered
And helicopters tracking you are hard to miss.
I believe in a "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard. A drone could hover outside my window watching me, but I don't think that would make people feel comfortable.
In a wiretap scenario, yes that would be uncomforting and worrisome.
But these drones are used to chase active criminals. Unless you committed a crime and ran back to your apartment, I think you’d be fine
FTA: They are not used to chase active criminals.
Helicopters are expensive and thus rare.
Consumer drones can't summon a SWAT team.
Still don’t know how this affects me. The use here seems to be for criminals on the run
Per the article, that doesn't appear to be the use case.
> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
> SFPD’s drone policy says operators must keep cameras trained on areas necessary to a mission and minimize the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people or places. It also instructs operators to take reasonable precautions, including turning cameras away, to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the exposed Skydio feeds reviewed by WIRED showed full missions from takeoff to landing, capturing not only detentions and searches, but also streets, apartment buildings, rooftops, cars, courtyards, and bystanders who did not appear to be the subject of any police operation.
So, we're back to the "if you don't break the law, you have nothing to worry about" argument for overbearing policing?
Again, the article says otherwise. So do the police.
To answer your question succinctly: The government is doing them, and that could be breaking the law.
If you are still unconvinced, ask yourself why you think the government breaking the law is not an issue?
Useful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau
Am I missing something? I can click the 'article' but its a big picture and a single paragraph. That reads like a picture description.
They paywalled the article, that’s why you can only see the first paragraph
Didn't realize it was paywalled. I read it in Apple News where it's not paywalled:
https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA
>Exposes reality of urban surveillance
Sounds like they're saying we should be appalled by this usage of drones... IDK, until we have some proof of an truly innocent (found by a court) or no reason to be suspected person (eg profiled, misidentified) having a bad outcome (such as arrest and long detention) without recourse (sue the crap out of the city, dept, or state) ...
This article basically reads as "Drones help police apprehend a man involved with auto theft" ...
The only "news" here (no shocker) is that the PD is somewhat ignorant on how to handle these new technologies securely. They need to go out on the open market and hire some of the best and brightest security folks displaced by Mythos (that's a joke), and secure their stuff with the basics.
Classic example of the Nothing to hide argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
nah, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is IMO until the police have something to hide (besides their crappy securing of the usage) It's not really a news piece.
If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
So do we need to wait for abuse with this specific piece of technology in order to be concerned?
They already do use tech to spy on exes, though
Police Officer Accused of Tracking Partner Using License Plate Reader: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/milwaukee-police-offic...
There will always be those who make excuses for the panopticon. Is yours that reducing auto theft is worth the tradeoffs?
AFAIK there is no right to privacy in public, no?
What I don't care so much about the data collection as I do about how it's used.
Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).
In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
> Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).
The police are doing these things too (stalking girlfriends, viewing cameras, following people).
> In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
The article lists several cases where they weren't being used in an "excellent manner." They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside. The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
And these are just the instances the investigators were able to find, on the five drones that had a public link to their footage. Footage that only dates back six months. How many more drones does SFPD have that weren't included in the archive? How many more unexcellent uses did the investigators miss because the footage expired?
+1. I think having cameras is good. In this case these are active calls and it’s great for all parties. How it’s used after the fact is what matters imo.
I could even get comfortable with tech like Flock if it was not so ripe for abuse.
Civilized countries do have limited rights to privacy in public. For example, it may be illegal to publish a photograph of a person without their consent.
For the record, most states have publicity rights (with exceptions) so that publishing a photo may still require somebody’s permission.
But the police don’t need a warrant to follow me in public, and even take pictures that they have no intention of publishing.
I think there is a valid discussion for devices like Flock. The CEO is a detriment to their company and the lack of police guardrails and auditing make it ripe for abuse.
Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.
I remember reading this excellent article on Bloomberg about a guy who started a company that uses Cessna's with high-quality cameras, and they fly over an area for hours, and then use that footage to rollback crimes.
They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.
It was really fascinating… In 2016.
At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.
Instead of planes, they are using drones…
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
Here is a RadioLab podcast [0] about the system from company Persistent Surveillance Systems [1].
An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).
0. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky
1. https://www.pss-1.com/
2. https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...
domestically we use the RQ-4 and MQ-4 and lie about it
Source?
Drones are cheap & reliable. Vs. blimps, balloons, and such have repeatedly proven themselves quite fragile.
Quadcopters, you mean? They are cheap, and reliable enough given that they are cheap, but that's all.
An unmanned plane is also called a drone.
I'm sure this wont be misused frequently with total impunity, right?
I think they also use planes with state of the art optics and cameras in other major US cities, especially before certain events, to go back in time later. If a crime happens they can trace back cars and suspects in the video archive. And I guess they might also do number plate recognition by default, to get even quicker results.
What are the safeguards that are in place here? What happens when this surveillance capability falls into the hands of an autocratic government?
Same as ALPRs and anything else related to policing.
We need protections/limits in place. But we also need a government that's reliable and "friendly" (to the extent a large government can be). We currently don't, so all these new techs are quite concerning.
Sad to see. Here in Europe it's definitely not any better. Despite the GDPR’s safeguards, tech surveillance is set to become one of the defining civil liberties battlegrounds in across the World. Even with the EU AI act, the people of europe are significantly at risk.
Wait until you find out what the EU want/have asked the GAM trio of big tech corps to do to your phone and private messaging platforms. (Coincidentally they suddenly don't think so big an anti competition problem exists anymore).
Are you referring to Chat Control 2.0 which has repeatedly failed to pass the Parliament and is illegal to implement today?
Or to the requirement for RCS for which certificates are only issued to trusted parties?
Great, just what I need - another reason to never leave my house.
It's nice to see SFPD taking car break-ins seriously.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Is it essential liberty to be able to run around doing crime without being surveiled?
This article literally documents several times SFPD used drones to surveil people who weren't committing any crimes. They sent their drones to spy on a guy who was sitting on a roof listening to music, and in another instance they sent drones to follow "suspicious individuals" who were just going to a basketball court to shoot hoops.
This is done despite the department's drone policy stating that "drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises."
Sweet, you've invented pre-crime.
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It's not a one-liner joke.
I believe citizens being able to run around without being continually surveilled is an essential liberty.
We don't surveil everyone all the time just in case they do a crime. It's not a joke.
You know he was talking about taxes...
What liberty does a drone with a camera break? Seems like a nice optimization on police resources.
There should be no optimization on police resources. When Katz v. USA (no expectation of privacy in public) was decided, surveillance was done by an officer who needed to be paid a middle class salary, maybe armed with a camera and a telephoto lens if we’re lucky. The average city police department barely knew what SIGINT meant.
Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.
These drones are “piloted” but it can be in a semiautonomous way. Your argument makes sense for Flock cameras but not for this style of drone. I think first response with a drone to an active call is a great use of resources for all parties. Flock cameras constantly tracking every movement, probably not given the severe lack of audits and guardrails.
If I had to pick one, I'd go with the Fourth Amendment.
Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only. Can you describe how this breaks the 4th? Does it really matter if it’s a human tracking down a suspect or a drone.
If you have any case law that shows general cameras break the 4th I would love to read.
> Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only.
I'm the person who posted the article lol. Which makes this deeply ironic because it's clear you didn't read it, otherwise you would know that the article lists several cases where the drones were used to investigate random people – not active calls. They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside.
The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
> Can you describe how this breaks the 4th?
Put me on the Supreme Court and I'd be happy to do that for you. Until then, there are more qualified people to do it and the rest of us will just know it when we see it. :)
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> Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only.
Did you? The article provides clear counterexamples to that policy.
Yup I did and it was not clear. I think those two examples are worthy of a discussion on scope creep but not clear policy violations atm. The intent is to be used on active calls which I believe is a great idea. A clear violation would be the drones actively patrolling and identify suspicious behavior. That’s bad and a clear violation of the policy.
Please let us know how this violates the 4th. I would love to learn more about it.
This is one of those areas that can be a slippery slope. Look at the UK and the terrible state it’s in. On the flip side I would hope that so long as the guardrails are in place that first response drones can be good for all parties.
> Please let us know how this violates the 4th.
It seem awfully similar to the geofence surveillance SCOTUS just said requires a warrant.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
Maybe similar trajectory but fundamentally Chatrie is about compelling stored data from a third party. I don’t believe there is any meaningful overlap between that and direct visual observation from police. Folks should argue it in court if so but I don’t see the link to 4th violations.
Chatrie has sections like this:
> Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct “retrospective[ly],” and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling “tireless and absolute surveillance” of any number of people in any number of places.
A certain level of drone surveillance would seem likely to rise to this level of intrusion, and I think ALPR cameras already do.
Agree I wish the article focused more on the storage and availability of the data instead of the narrative they wrote. It’s in there but not the focus which imo is the issue. I think it’s great to have the drones as active response but like ALPR, it’s ripe for abuse after the fact. These systems can have great value but are ripe for abuse, I hope organizations catchup to build the proper guardrails.
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/
See also "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime"
The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character.
https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Rey...
So these are only being used on active calls. As I have said else where there is a line to draw on active calls and data mining. Having an eye on the sky for an active calls is a pretty nice use of resources and serves all parties. I am a big proponent that body cams should be required to be on for all calls.
Not going to dig in either of those links because I suspect they go down the data mining route more like a flock less about active calls. If you would like to point out why these are bad for active calls I am all ears.
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And the amazing thing is that DJI was the ones lambasted for their shitty security practices.
But here we are, with Skydio users openly using public sharing links to their drone feeds 24x7x365 apparently.
Sounds like another vendor needs to get added to the Covered List, methinks, but the lobbyists won't let that one fly.
The only thing insecure was the market position of the domestic competition.
Or rather, lobbyists will let it fly as long as it's got a camera.