Salon reports in Senate: Drones require new privacy laws  about testimony before a Senate panel calling for an upgrading of privacy protections in light of the increasing proliferation of drones in the US.

The article provides:

As domestic surveillance drones proliferate, the public needs greater protection experts tell hearing

WASHINGTON – Privacy laws urgently need to be updated to protect the public from information-gathering by the thousands of civilian drones expected to be flying in U.S. skies in the next decade or so, legal experts told a Senate panel Wednesday.

A budding commercial drone industry is poised to put mostly small, unmanned aircraft to countless uses, from monitoring crops to acting as lookouts for police SWAT teams, but federal and state privacy laws have been outpaced by advances in drone technology, experts said at a Senate hearing.

Current privacy protections from aerial surveillance are based on Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlantic published a story, So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman, regarding  the use of a drone in Seattle by a person to interfere with another’s privacy.

It provides:

Back in October, Alexis wrote a piece asking what rights do we have with regard to the air above our property. Walk onto someone’s lawn and you’re trespassing; fly over it in a helicopter and you’re in the clear — “the air is a public highway,” the Supreme Court declared in 1946. But what about the in-between space? Does the availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones, aka UAVs) throw a wrench in the old legal understandings?

Well, here’s where the rubber meets the road for this abstract line of questioning. The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog is reporting a complaint it received from a resident in the Miller Park neighborhood. She writes:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted Read the rest of this entry »

Today the Privacy Commissioner issued a press release regarding cyber security in line with National Cyber Security Awareness week, commencing today.

It states, in part:

Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim today encouraged all Australians to take steps to protect their personal information during National Cyber Security Awareness Week (20 to 24 May 2013). The aim of the Awareness Week is to help people understand the simple steps they can take to protect their personal and financial information when online.

‘The web has Read the rest of this entry »

The Privacy Commissioner has published the speech he gave last week. It can be found here.

Below is a slightly edited transcript.  It relevantly provides:

The effect on Boston of the terrorist bombing has been profound.  I am currently in Boston at a conference at the MIT.  It dominates the news, it permeates discussions.  And it seems to be effecting American’s views on street surveillance.  The New York Times in Poll Finds Strong Acceptance for Public Surveillance  highlights a willingness of the public to allow for greater surveillance Read the rest of this entry »