Evan Scroggs

Mrs. Martin
English 1101
5-1-17

Should people be allowed to prevent drones from flying over their property?

Ones privacy should always be protected and taken seriously in an era where our

technology is slowly taking that away from us. The use of aerial drones are becoming very

popular, but serve great risk in being used. The power of the technology within a drone puts our

privacy and safety at stake. Putting the legal rights of a human aside for use of a machine, which

seems to be happening already. All people should be allowed to prevent drones from flying over

their property, as the right of any human being.

We are living in a generation that is being controlled by new and ever-changing

technology, which pushes the boundaries of existing laws. Drones are a unique hybrid of

technologies that can fly as well as incorporate a computing system that can detrimental to our

society. Drones have the ability to take high-quality photographs, record sound, and use wifi.

Imagine a device that can hover above your property, with the ability to take very personal

information that was never meant to be exposed. That is the type of world we are living in today.

The information that the internet has webbed through society is scary, yet this information is

most important to the people in control of what can be possessed. Daniel J Solove, a professor of

law at the George Washington University Law School, and author of the article, The End of

Privacy? states, The government also compromises privacy by assembling vast databases that

can be searched for suspicious patterns of behavior. The National Security Agency listens and

examines the records of millions of telephone conversations. Other agencies analyze financial

transactions. Thousands of government bodies at the federal and state level have records of
personal information, chronicling births, marriages, employment, property ownership and more.

The information is often stored in public records, making it readily accessible to anyoneand

the trend toward more accessible personal data continues to grow as more records become

electronic. (103). Now again, imagine a device that can hover over your property and take all

that information listed, without the property owner knowing what was happening. The

technology in drones is THAT powerful. Letting drones take that information from us isnt

sensible, and action should be taken before that information ends up in the endless inter web.

One may wonder what the motivation is behind letting these drones fly over our property,

and what would someone want to do with our private information? Well the answer is for

profitable gains and control over the mass population. There is a trace of everything do, and that

trace is important for the government to be able to understand the trends and what the mass

population is up to, before we do. Drones have that capability to secretly vacuum up the traces

left behind and create a profit for those putting this classified information to use. In the article,

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, he states, The faster we surf across the Web

the more links we click and pages we viewthe more opportunities Google and other

companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the

proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we

leave behind as we flit from link to linkthe more crumbs, the better. As more technology

comes out and advances, we tend to leave more crumbs laying around. As Carr was saying,

there is incentives for this information to be taken and used for commercial internet use, and who

knows what else. Every human has the right to privacy, and allowing drones to have these

opportunities is inhumane, putting basic rights aside.

 One may argue there are laws in tact to protect privacy of citizens. Which there are, but

with technology ever-changing, these laws are not always up to speed nor applied to advancing

technologies. To think that our government would greatly enforce privacy laws on drones which

already push the boundaries, is a bit off the mark. James Gleick, the author of, How Google

Dominates Us talks about Google pushing boundaries with privacy, sourcing to a conversation

between author and journalist Steven Levy and co founder of Google, Larry Page. It does not

have to mean Obey all the laws. When Google embarked on its program to digitize copyrighted

books and copy them onto its servers, it did so in stealth, deceiving publishers with whom it was

developing business relationships. Google knew that the copying bordered on illegal. It

considered its intentions honorable and the law outmoded. I think we knew that there would be

a lot of interesting issues, Levy quotes Page as saying, and the way the laws are structured isnt

really sensible. As seen by Larry Page, there are many instances in which these privacy rules

seem to not come into effect into new and mind-controlling technology. Without the law behind

our privacy, who else is there to defend our rights beside ourselves?

So YES, people should be allowed to prevent drones from flying over their property, to

protect what the government and their non-enforced laws cant. Our privacy. All of the authors

mentioned are aware of the lack of privacy with advancing technology, and bring attention where

it is needed. The risk of the safety and privacy of our population will continue to rise if we allow

drones to fly over our property. We must put an end to the flight of the drones before they take

off with any private information we have left, if any.

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company,

27 Apr. 2017. Web. 09 May 2017.

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

Web. 09 May 2017.

John Weber. "Should You Be Allowed to Prevent Drones From Flying Over Your

Property?" The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 22 May 2016. Web. 09 May 2017.

Solove, Daniel J. "The End of Privacy?" Scientific American. N.p., Sept. 2008. Web. 9

May 2017.