[magicalist]

It's silly that this is the top comment. Your examples aren't even analogous. The proper comparison would be the Streetview car sitting outside your house filming continuously, or someone wearing Google Glass standing outside your front window looking in while recording. These things would bother you far more than a Streetview car driving by or meeting someone wearing Google Glass.

However, as other's have noted, we already have remedies for those sorts of things, and things like someone filming via a telescope pointed at your house (you call the cops). I can get the slippery slope argument Schmidt is making, but you could make the same argument about just about any already-available concealable tech device, from radio transmitters to spy cams to the web cams in every laptop with exploitable software. We do have growing pains with all of those things, and so we inevitably get people that exploit them who the law isn't fully able to deal with (or even catch), but with all the benefits they also bring, it isn't worth trying to ban these things over that fact.

[ihsw]

If everybody has Google Glass on their heads, is there a difference between whether it's a drone buzzing above our heads and whether it's face-mounted cameras?

Mobile phones are already used as spy devices -- do you really think the camera and microphone are off? How do you know?

Most people plainly place their phones on tables after sitting, but would it be so shocking for them to carry a tape recorder everywhere?

[magicalist]

Uh, that's exactly my point. We are surrounded by devices that can be and sometimes are abused for this kind of surveillance. We've judged them useful enough that it warrants using existing systems to deal with abusers, even while acknowledging that many of them can be used so surreptitiously that we're not going to catch everyone who is abusing them. Drones have so many uses I would say they fall in that same category.