Ali DiCioccio, a 19-year-old Massachusetts woman, was "creeped out" early this week by a small drone peeking into her second-story window.
Such stories have urged lawmakers in some U.S. states to regulate the use of drones to snoop on people’s homes. Drones can fly in areas where someone does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, though drone law is playing catch-up with drone technology.
Camera-equipped drones have commercial uses — they can inspect crops, photograph real estate and survey land. Federal Aviation Administration, charged with setting federal drone-flight regulation, predicts that around seven million drones of varying sizes will be in the air by 2020. The FAA believes that 200,000 small drones flew in US airspace in 2014, with the agency receiving 238 reports of “potentially unsafe” incidents.
Companies such as Amazon are considering using them to make deliveries, with other companies using them to reshape farmland management and make industrial inspections.
Recently, the FAA issued new regulations requiring any drones weighing more than .55 lbs (250 grams) and less than 55 lbs (25kg) to be registered.
As soon as you put a drone in the sky, people have an irrational reaction and think that there is an invasion of privacy; similar to Google Glass.
In Seattle, a woman called the police to say a drone was spying into her 26th-floor apartment. When in fact, a building developer had hired an aerial photography company to make images property nearby and wasn’t peeping into homes.