Privacy laws are in urgent need of updating in order to protect the public form information-gathering by the thousands of civilian-owned drones expected to be flying in U.S. skies in the next decade, legal experts told a Senate panel Wednesday.
According to an article from The Associated Press, the unmanned aircraft have countless uses, from monitoring crops to acting as lookouts for SWAT teams, but federal and state privacy laws have been outpaced by advances in technology. Current privacy protections from aerial surveillance are based on court decisions from the 1980s, before the widespread drone use was anticipated.