Wright doesn’t pilot the drones herself. “I try to hire gamers. I go to the colleges and high schools and I find out who the geeks are, and then I hire them.” She said that her pilots are more skilled than she would ever be – and they like the challenge. Some of them are working towards their own private investigator licences, and their hours piloting the little devices can count as hours towards their certification. (None of Wright’s gamer pilots were willing to talk for this article. “They’re introverts,” she told me. “Not shy, but introverts.”)

Understandably, the idea of using drones to spy on people isn’t something everybody is comfortable with. In a case in Seattle in 2013, a woman reported that someone was using a drone to spy on her. “This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield,” she told the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. “I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away.” Her husband asked the drone operator, who was standing nearby, to move along – but the operator claimed to be acting within his legal rights.

Tightening regulations



Whether that’s true isn’t always clear. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 35 states considered adding drone bills to the books last year, and 10 states actually did add new laws. In Iowa, for example, it’s now illegal for the state to use drones to enforce traffic laws. In North Carolina, no one can use a drone for surveillance of a person or private property. And Tennessee now specifies that it’s a misdemeanour to use drones for surveillance of people who are hunting or fishing.

Wright’s drone operations might soon become legally questionable too. Earlier this month, a California senator introduced a bill that would extend property rights into airspace, meaning that drones flying over private property would be considered trespassers. Just a few days before that, President Obama and the Federal Aviation Administration announced new drone regulations as well, requiring – among other things – that drones must be under 55lb (25kg) and that operators must keep the flying vehicles in sight at all times.