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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I’ve already had a drone hovering outside Daughters bedroom window.

A couple of years ago, a guy up the street got a "drone" for Christmas, and spent the next couple of weeks flying into the backyards of everyone on the block, presumably to look in the windows or see what else he could get away with. I don't know why he thought that was a good idea, especially since the thing was noisy as hell.

It stopped suddenly. I don't know if someone called the police, or hit it with a tennis racket, or what. But by Saint Valentine's Day he was back to racing his remote controlled cars up and down the block, instead.

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I’ll never understand people who use drones like this, even ignoring the obvious moral and ethical issues of voyeurism they’re loud and obnoxious at the altitudes you would need to go peeping through windows.

Every time I try and assuage fears laypeople have about drones and privacy there’s a story or anecdote about some dumbass who does stuff like this anyway...

If you really want to spy on somebody, you don’t use a noisy buzzing drone right outside a window, or hovering in an otherwise empty sky. Even something as crude as a smartphone on a stick could be more covert.

Surprised that even tech enthusiasts are often so fearful of drones while not worried about the hundreds of cameras already filming their activities in most public places.

It's not about the public spaces, it's about private spaces.

In the scenario I wrote about above, every house in the neighborhood has a seven-foot-tall cinderblock wall around it. The guy was flying over these walls to look in the people's first-floor windows from their backyards. A cell phone on a stick isn't a problem in that scenario.

Selfie sticks on subway trains present a far bigger privacy risk than fish-eye lensed sport-cams strapped to a flying lawnmower.

Even further than this, the type of camera found on most drones is quite terrible for detailed surveillance work. Even if it does have a "high definition" camera recording to local storage these are Gopro style lenses with massive FOV, fisheye distortion and calibrated to handle a very wide range of light exposure up to and including direct sun. Shooting meaningful video through a window is a joke at best. As you've identified the noise generated at distances close enough to resolve any meaningful detail are even more comical

Large lenses are very heavy and benefit greatly from a stable platform. Tripods and low earth orbit are preferred by spies of consequence.

So all those government types using technologies like "gorgon stare" from aircraft and other aerial platforms aren't consequential?

Gorgon Stare is, to my understanding, using much larger fixed wing aircraft capable of carrying and stabilizing the added weight of a telephoto lens. Glass and mirrors are the key for imaging; multirotor UAVs have very limited payload lifting capabilities and even if they can produce the required thrust, an offset center of gravity caused by large lenses or mirrors slung below the rotors can have profound effects on their agility, speed, and flight time. Gorgon Stare as a program appears to be calibrated towards ID and tracking of vehicle sized targets across an urban landscape; this discussion is about the unrealistic perception that 250g-1kg quadcopters are somehow desirable for perverts. Neither consumer multi-rotors nor military reaper/predators are particularly stealthy surveillance options since anybody close enough to spy on is going to be well aware of the aircrafts presence. 10 foot mirrors in low earth orbit tend to be the tool of choice for serious spies.

> Surprised that even tech enthusiasts are often so fearful of drones while not worried about the hundreds of cameras already filming their activities in most public places.

The cameras are also in neighborhoods, and if you have neighbors, you probably have several cameras pointing at your property, too.

Ring cameras are everywhere, and since they upload to the cloud, their recordings are one request to Amazon away from being in the government's hands.

What you can film from your doorbell camera location is of much less concern to me than what you can film hovering outside my window.

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