People are freaked out about drones being used by Peeping Toms, when the real privacy risk could be much more “innocent.” And embarassing.
An Australian woman was recently photographed by a drone subbathing nude in her private backyard. Bad enough. But the photo was taken by a real estate agency shopping the property next door. The agent didn’t notice the victim, Mary Lingard, and published the photo. In lots of places. Online. In a magazine. And worst of all, on a billboard in front of the property. A huge billboard. Next door to Lingard’s home. For all her neighborsf to see.
By all accounts, it seems an honest mistake. The billboard was removed. It’s hard (that is, impossible) to get the picture off the Internet. however.
Needless to say, Lingard — a mother and grandmother — is humiliated, and now the butt of jokes in her neighborhood.
“I heard a noise and then I saw this odd thing flying around and thought it was a kid’s toy. It hovered around and luckily I was face down at the time,” Lingard told the Herald-Sun. “Then a couple of weeks later I walked out my door and thought oh my god that’s what it was doing; taking photos. You could see it’s our backyard and quite clearly it was me. It’s in the real estate magazine, it’s on the internet and on the board and I’m really embarrassed.”
There’s already been celebrated freak-outs about drones and naked photos, and the corresponding, “You luddites need to calm down,” response. Here’s a pretty good summary from Business Insider.
Yes, laws are already in place that make Peeping Tom tricks illegal. And yes, this kind of thing happened when Google ran around the planet taking pictures of everything. They did that from the street, however. Everything that was photographed could be spotted by someone standing in a public place.
Drones quite literally give this problem another dimension, exposing all of us to photography from above. We can’t make them illegal, but as with so many new technologies, we shouldn’t simply rush forward with the fun and ignore the consequences until they become too much to bear. Preventing drone disasters is everyone’s responsibility — regulators, real estate agents, magazine and billboard publishers — everyone except Lingard. If there aren’t real consequences in place to scare drone operators straight before more stories like this appear, we’re going to see fewer people sunbathing in their backyards.
That kind of chilling effect is exactly the nightmare threatened by modern privacy invasions. We need to act before the chilling effect is already in frozen in place.
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