Pie in the Sky

So, leaving aside for a moment why anyone in the known universe would want to film packs of old ladies in activewear out on their morning whinge constitutional, let’s consider what the drone can actually film. Now assuming that the drone pilot has managed to work out that the two pixels on the 5″ smartphone screen (displaying their drone’s live feed) is an actual live person, they would then have to fly to within about 10m of said person in question in order to get anything remotely wank-worthy.

The reason a drone would have to get so close is because their lenses are wide angle – they are designed to work best with fast movement and to capture as much of a scene as possible. The vast majority do not have zoom lenses and even those that do, such as the Mavic 2 Zoom, would be useless for spying because even with the improved focal range, they still have to get in close to capture anything resembling detail. Sure, you could buy a professional grade drone and stick a DSLR with a big old zoom on it, but nobody would go to those lengths because the drone would be extremely noisy and large and as visible as the Good Year fucking Blimp. So, given that a drone needs to get really close in order to capture anything close to resembling human features – they are singularly useless for spying because at that range they sound like a hornets nest on full alert.

So leaving aside the fact that the lens on 99% of drones is spectacularly ill-suited to creeping on people and the fact that they are about as stealthy as a pneumatic drill, there’s the issue of battery life. If they want to get their drones home safely then most owners give their batteries a good degree of latitude when flying, which means that if they get 20 minutes of flight time from a battery they’re doing well. That’s not much time in the air to be roaming around the neighbourhood, making a racket, trying to find naked people. Then there’s the lights. Now admittedly a pervert flying a drone at night would probably find a way of disabling or obscuring its lights, but if they didn’t it’d be like having a Christmas tree hovering outside the bathroom window.

So, to recap – they’re noisy as fuck, have limited battery life, are (usually) lit up like a Christmas tree and have lenses that are utterly ill-suited to photographing the intimate details of humans. The bottom line is this – commercial drones are about as well-suited to spying on people as a shopping trolley is to off-roading through the desert.