I have started a petition to stop the newest California drone law. Please consider signing so safe operators can continue flying and innovating. Thank you.
You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!
I have started a petition to stop the newest California drone law. Please consider signing so safe operators can continue flying and innovating. Thank you.
You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!
Comments
@Jimmy Oliver - Your petition mentions ShadowQuad Aerial Imaging and also mentions being unable to "earn a living filming at 350 feet". However, I'm unable to locate any FAA exemptions that grant that company permission to operate commercially. Is that business operating legally? If it were, the FAA exemption would permit ShadowQuad to film at any altitude below 400 feet (with property owner permission, of course).
Below 400 and above 350? That is a small gap thank you very much. If you are flying at a public park near homes you are going to have problems. Amazon and Google (and many others) will have to breach this zone to delivery goods. The FAA has guidelines and now each state will have guidelines... This will serve to legitimize the downing of drones that are within shotgun range. They are already marketing drone-killing ammo and other countermeasures.
bigkahuna has a good point about the reasonableness of getting permission from property owners.
Also, how does this new law harm a small business operating a drone? As we know, operating a drone as a commercial business requires an FAA exemption. And every FAA exemption already contains a paragraph that restricts drone operations over private property. For example, here is a excerpt from the FAA exemption granted to Force 4 Photography, LLC
All operations shall be conducted over private or controlled-access property with permission from the property owner/controller or authorized representative. Permission from property owner/controller or authorized representative will be obtained for each flight to be conducted.
This shows how some of the legislation being proposed for consumer drones originates in commercial drone legislation. If it's reasonable for commercial, it can sometimes be reasonable for consumers, no? Other examples of commercial drone flight restrictions, as documented in all the FAA exemptions, are: line of sight only, below 400 feet, and daytime only. At this stage, all these are accepted restrictions for commercial drone operators. Why shouldn't they be for consumer drone operators, too?
Hi Oscar,
My point wasn't making new laws, but that plenty of them already exist re privacy concerns.
And the reality is when it has come to computer privacy, or almost any other form of privacy that might have had even the slightest negative impact on business, or government snooping, privacy has always taken the back seat.
So here the politicians finally have a platform for privacy where it won't negatively impact them or big business.
Unfortunately, this is one of those issues it's really easy to be for or against regardless of its actual importance.
Politicians find it an easy platform to get themselves noticed with.
And politicians like nothing better than to be seen by their constituency to be actually doing something, even if it is of no actual good to anybody.
And that is what we have here.
In fact it seems more like a diversion tactic in a world where Individual privacy has already disappeared in a sea of surveillance cameras, individual computer intelligence gathering and control.
Homeland Security, local law enforcement and big business all reap huge benefits at the expense of our loss of privacy.
Like the individually targeted ads on the page I am looking at now.
Or the fact that any institution you want to deal with already has access to and make use of way more information about you than they have any right to have (and even worse much of which always turns out to be inaccurate or out of date).
I had to call Paypal to replace a compromised card the other day and one of their verification questions was what watercraft did I register in 1998 (I had 4 watercraft at that time and had no idea which one they might be referring to.)
Had to get verification by mail and return it causing 4 week delay.
This is not information they should have had access to in the first place and worse, they misused it completely.
This is what needs to be fixed, not non-existent drone privacy issues.
Exactly. The public, and more specifically politicians, know little to nothing about drones. They see a percieved problem and start the process. The UAV operators in this forum probably ask permission and fly safely. Media hype has motivated these actions. People have flown RC craft for years so why the concern now? Cameras. If you leave your house to go shopping you are filmed around 50 times in a day. That's not to mention all the selfies you are posting on your own. Blanket legislation of this type is irresponsible with no thought to future industry and commerce. This law itself is not that big a deal, but it opens the door to more and more restrictions.
@Gary please propose one of those many solutions to privacy. I'd like to hear it.
The truth is, privacy is spectrum depending on the person and their perception of reality. No magic
bullet here. As Americans, our sense of privacy is very skewed, we give it away w/o thought on EULA agreements,
yet we scream bloody murder on the tiniest physical invasions of privacy.
I'm w/ Bigkahuna, the norm within our group is to not consider drones as threatening bc we know
so much about them and understand the potential they offer. Anyone looking to do business w/ a
drone needs to step up and listen to that cry for privacy. Believe it or not, it is possible to gain access
to protected places/people and it happens through trust. You achieve this through listening and transparency
about who you are and how you operate. Anyone who knows anything about providing value in a market can
tell you just how financially rewarding trust & reliability are.
Signed.
@BigKahuna. I never understood the privacy concerns? A drone camera's got nothing on a person with a telephoto lens (costing roughly the same).
https://twitter.com/GregoryMcNeal/status/634846304229724160
Safety concerns, of course! The privacy concern to me sounds like a boogieman with plenty of anti-snooping/peeping-tom laws already on the books.
https://twitter.com/GregoryMcNeal/status/634846304229724160
Drones are a hot political football, mostly kicked around to curry favor of voters and other legislators.
Very little logical or reasonable happening here and sadly, once again, California is at the forefront of the stupidity.
The fact of the matter is that there are very reasonable ways to address privacy issues, and pandering to mass fears of unrealistic invasion of privacy isn't going to help anybody.
Best Regards,
Gary
Sounds sensible. The appraiser takes around 20 minutes and is in and out. The prospect of hashing it out with 5 potential neighbors at 8 am is daunting. This is just the first law with no real accidents or injuries reported. I would be for a "hobbyist license" where a course is taken, etc. The manufacturers are selling these units like they fly themselves.
@bigkahuna,
Some good, commonsense suggestions!
Regards,
TCIII AVD
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