Legislators in Vermont are considering passage of draft privacy law that would ban most drone flights over private property below 100 feet, or to capture images of someone even at higher altitudes.
State bill H.284 is another attempt to find a compromise between protecting individual privacy, and the rights of drone operators to navigate around or above non-public property. The owners of such land often have very strong, at times violent, and always mistakenly proprietary notions about Federal Aviation Administration regulated airspace over them.
As also nearly always in these cases – or so it seems – the text currently before Vermont legislators seeking to restrict flight permissions for all non-commercial drone activity was born of a single, obnoxious pilot activating a similarly isolated antagonist.
“This whole drone bill came about because a constituent reached out to both me and (another legislator), and said there’s a drone that hovers over my house when my daughter is sunbathing,” the bill’s co-sponsor Josie Leavitt told Vermont Biz, illustrating a healthy democratic system at work in the broadest interests of society possible.
Why the snark? Because while most people will empathize with and support efforts to protect individual privacy – especially from what appear to be a particularly fungoid aerial moron – H.284 casts a pretty wide anti-drone net to combat even occasional skin-encountering overflights, much less a single creepy operator.
The draft law seeks to “prohibit a person from flying a drone for hobby or recreational purposes at an altitude of less than 100 feet above privately owned real property without the written consent of the property owner; (and) prohibit the use of a drone to record an image of a person on privately owned real property in violation of the person’s reasonable expectation of privacy without the person’s written consent.”
Is that all? Of course not. It would also require all vendors of drones to dutifully inform buyers of those restrictions (ah, an additional fun chore for those Best Buy checkout workers). The bill would impose $50 fines for all first-time offenders, $250 for people repeatedly skirting the yard of Representative Leavitt’s hacked off constituent.
In noting “reasonable expectation of privacy,” the law also does a “fake left, go right” maneuver in seeming to limit offensive behavior to pointed-sounded “surveillance.”
Alas, that is not defined as sleuthy, hi-tech spying or criminal stalking, but rather capturing any imagery containing a “person with sufficient visual clarity to be able to obtain information about the person’s identity, habits, conduct, movements, or whereabouts.”
More generally, it goes on to note the prohibition aims to safeguard the privacy of anyone “not observable by another person located at ground level in a place where the other person has a legal right to be, regardless of whether the person is observable from the air using a drone.”
Awaiting its passage, anticipate the occasional skyward-aimed gunshot report out of the Green Mountain State.
Image: Venti Views/Unsplash
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