| I would urge you to reconsider your stance on this as "a PR issue". Having readily available realtime aerial imaging data involves numerous ethical and safety concerns. Stating that people who have these ethical concerns are "few" and that you would "like to brush them off" shows a lack of consideration for how your technology could negatively impact others. Based on a recent paper [1] , "the results show that Europe is 83.28 percent covered with an average of one aerial photography every half an hour and a ground sampling distance of 0.96 meters per pixel". Assuming 30m intervals and a 1m GSD I can know when someone is or isn't home based on whether or not a car is in their driveway. For people living in the vicinity of an airport where the GSD and intervals would presumably be much higher I could track individuals to and from their home or office from the comfort of a coffee shop. Either of the above capabilities has ramifications for things like: - stalking and harassment (no need to follow someone physically) - home invasion and theft (can determine when someone is out of the house) - targeting of dissidents (can track who showed up at a meeting) - kidnapping and rendition (can know when someone is isolated without committing physical surveillance resources) Those are just a few of the things I can come up with off the top of my head. Even if you limit your tools to governments and businesses what prevents illegitimate organizations from using shell companies [2] or other means for establishing legitimate accounts to your services, and what prevents individuals within legitimate organizations from accessing the tools for personal means? [3] Calling this a "PR issue" grossly understates the potential damage a technology like this can cause in the wrong hands. [1] "Aerial Imagery Based on Commercial Flights as Remote Sensing Platform" 03/2020 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339988238_Aerial_Im... [2] https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/09/news/shell-companies-crime/... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveil-lance-watchdo... *edited for formatting |
I'm more or less a team of one at the moment and the original instinct when I had the idea was along the lines of "If I'm having to address privacy concerns, I must be doing something right", implying some degree of public interest in the product. There's now quantifiable interest and the waitlist hasn't stopped growing. Comments like yours make me realize I need a rock-solid set of first principles before enlisting outside help. The eternal optimist sees infinite use cases and it's easy to discard the bad and the ugly ones for the good, but the ramifications you've listed will kill the product before it even truly starts.
I'd love to chat more about this side of product development and throw some questions your way if you've got some time to spare (chris@notasatellite.com), but thank you again for the thoughtful response and reading material.