[jeffbee]

Surprisingly, it seems to me that you are wrong. People will absolutely lose their minds whenever they hear about an unmanned aircraft, but never talk about manned aircraft. There have been tons of news articles about "police drones" an other kinds of scaremongering, that never seem to note that the cops using an airplane to follow you in the dark has been a thing for decades. The only new thing is the pilot does not necessarily need to sit in the aircraft.

[SilasX]

Haha exactly. Same thing for military drone strikes. I've noticed way too much of the debate focused on the "drone" part and not the "hey do you have an adequate process for target selection, civilian review, and consequences for targeting the wrong people?" The specifics of the hardware should be irrelevant to that question.

[nneonneo]

I would definitely mind if the police were following me personally in an airplane…

[jeffbee]

Did you recently rob a bank or carjack an old lady? If not, I sincerely doubt that anyone would go to the trouble of following you around.

[s1gsegv]

Due to the cost of doing so, right. If the aircraft were suddenly unmanned and significantly cheaper to fly in potentially great quantities, it’s easier to justify doing so “just in case.”

It’s concerning to think that because police have traditionally had tools that were quite powerful in single use to balance out technology limitations of the time, this balance should not be rethought when the usage becomes significantly more efficient.

If you have to get a black van and big dish microphone to surveil someone’s single conversation in the park, it’s going to be employed when there’s already a strong suspicion, seems fair. Now if you’re able to hide a wireless microphone in every tree, computer-transcribe everything that’s said 24/7, and match it with cameras that can capture facial recognition data, you can build a file of everything everyone says in public, just in case you have to find something against them. What’s more, you can have an AI scrutinize every single conversation and sentiment on a scale that is not otherwise possible.

All of this uses the same fundamental rights, but clearly the outcome poses a huge problem.

[nneonneo]

Yes, but clearly an insurance company will go to the trouble of flying a plane around my house. Whether it’s manned or unmanned is immaterial - I wouldn’t want them to do it.

[jeffbee]

You want to have insurance but you're not willing to let your insurer inspect the covered assets?

[FireBeyond]

LOL. Police around here will routinely use rotary for grocery store thefts, fixed wing for pursuit of non-violent suspects. In fact a couple of weeks ago, they deployed a State Patrol fixed wing to come south about 40 miles to here to look for "a group of young males dressed in black that were graffiting numerous buildings in town".

[datascienced]

Someone is in incentivised! Maybe x miles in the plane to get it again next year?