Ken Anderson writes:
Today’s (Sunday, Sep 8, 2013) New York Times has a story by Anne Eisenberg, “Preflight Turbulence for Commercial Drones.”
[…]
However, as the article discusses, the same technologies which make drones so useful for mapping and surveying make them useful for surveillance of people, whether by government agencies or, for that matter, private parties. These are very real concerns, and government at all levels needs to think about what the correct approach to privacy and surveillance should be – where, it’s important to note, the erosion of privacy arises not simply from drones, but from drones combined with increasingly powerful aerial sensors, computing power to be able to undertake real-time (or increasingly so) identification, and the ability to be able to upload all that to the internet.
Read more on The Volokh Conspiracy.