The hundreds of unexplained drones reported flying over New Jersey and other states across the East Coast in recent days have caused both confusion and anxiety. Who is flying these unmanned aircraft over homes, military bases, and President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course? What do they want? And what are they trying to do — or find out?
After all, most privately owned drones are, among other things, flying high-definition video cameras. The uncertainty posed by these unexplained flying objects has sparked concern, temporary FAA flight restrictions and many, many conspiracy theories. Some of these reactions seem far-fetched, like speculation about Iranian spies. But the fear on the ground is real. At least two local politicians are now calling on the military to shoot unidentified drones down. (We wouldn’t recommend that.) Even Trump has weighed in.
Anxiety about these unexplained flying objects is certainly understandable, as are calls for the investigation and regulation of the drone flights. There may be laws that are being broken here, and if no laws are being broken, maybe we need better laws. At their core, though, a lot of the concern here boils down to the need to better protect our privacy.
New Jerseyans — like all Americans — don’t want others snooping in their private affairs, whether via mysterious flying video cameras hovering over their patios, data brokers scooping up their health and location data, or old-fashioned Peeping Toms. We don’t like it when other people invade our privacy — and for good reason. As I’ve written previously, our privacy matters a great deal.
Privacy matters because information is power, and information about people means power over those people, regardless of whether we are talking about drone cameras watching us in our homes, social networks sharing sensitive data about us with advertisers, or artificial intelligence algorithms using our data to generate scores about our eligibility for health insurance, jobs or access to loans.
To be sure, we already have a number of laws protecting our privacy from snoopers, whether those snoopers track us online, follow us home or fly through the air. Old trespassing and invasion of privacy laws protect us from unwanted intrusions into our private affairs. States — including New Jersey — often have criminal protections against unwarranted privacy invasions.
In 2012, Rutgers freshman Dharun Ravi used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate Tyler Clementi and posted about it on social media. Clementi later took his own life by jumping from a bridge, and Ravi ultimately pleaded guilty to attempted invasion of privacy.
And there are already plenty of rules for drone flights, depending on how large the drone is, and where, when and how high they fly. Even basic recreational flyers have to pass a basic FAA safety test. Almost all drones must be registered. Thus, many of the current calls for the FAA to prohibit the drone flights have less to do with the safety of commercial aviation than they do with more nebulous privacy concerns, though untracked or unauthorized drone flights can certainly pose a risk for the safety of airline passengers and flight crews alike. Hopefully, we’ll get to the bottom of this mystery soon. But at the very least, the New Jersey drone mystery should be a wake-up call. We need our elected officials to act thoughtfully to protect our privacy against new technological threats, aerial and otherwise. No matter who is operating these drones, they are at best an off-putting nuisance and at worst a violation of our right to privacy. And the problem is even more true for our digital lives. The United States is one of the few Western democracies without a separate, dedicated federal data protection agency, and the state privacy laws that do exist often receive a failing grade from civil society groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center. And this doesn’t even really take into account the new generation of artificial intelligence technologies that businesses, governments, schools and universities are deploying to ingest and make decisions based on our personal data. New technologies like drones can be fun — and they certainly have some useful applications for business and government. But hopefully this drone mystery will drive lawmakers to regulate these technologies more thoughtfully, in ways that allow us to enjoy their benefits while also not sending entire states into a full-blown panic.
Neil Richards
Neil Richards is the Koch Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and faculty director of the Cordell Institute.
Ryan Durrie
Ryan Durrie is the policy director of the Cordell Institute, a research institute that works to advance ethical health and human information policy in the context of digital technologies. 
