See anyone familiar?

Yeah, me neither.

I bring up this point because when you’re flying between 60–400 feet above ground level, even with ultra HD resolution, it’s pretty hard to see personally identifiable faces. And if you think I’m not considering those “enhance” tools you see in TV shows & movies…they’re bullshit.

To get uber technical for the moment, leading network video and surveillance firm Axis released a report entitled “Perfect Pixel Count” outlining pixel requirements for identifying a person on video. You can find the full 2014 report here.

As you can plainly tell from the above referenced Axis report, if a person’s entire body is not at least 1/3 of the frame height in an image, it becomes exceedingly difficult for them to be positively identified. This means one has to be, at a rough maximum distance, 30 feet from their target to identify him or her.

Now, zoom cameras do exist for drones. But they are extremely rare and costly. And because of the increased shake when using any magnification on a drone (believe it or not, but they can’t be perfectly still in the air), their use represents an insignificant fraction of drones you’re likely to encounter in the wild.

At 30 feet, a drone is not even practical for spying. It’s noisy and obvious. Compare it to the iPhone 7 Plus, which has a 2x optical zoom and consider that someone standing 60 feet from you can aim their phone’s camera at you, take a picture and you will likely not even notice.

Practically speaking, smartphones are far more of a spying concern.

Hopefully this logic and non-alternative facts alleviate some of the privacy concerns around drones. And if you’re a celebrity in California, there’s already a law preventing “drone spying”. So worry not about drones spying on you. It’s not what they’re good at.

Terrorism

Now here’s something to worry about…

(apologies I couldn’t locate an embedded video)

Truth is, humans have been killing each other in all kinds of unique ways over the course of our history. As I stated in my Dr. Dronelove in 2017 piece, I’m of the opinion that if a person is dead-set on causing harm and destruction, we shouldn’t focus too much on the tools they use, but stopping them and then understanding their intent/motivation.

Obviously ISIS, and for that matter anyone fanatical enough to jerry-rig a Phantom 4 with explosives, have a fairly devious motivation. And judging by the fact that their followers are encouraged to also strap similar explosives to their own person, effectively becoming a personal delivery vehicle…well…let’s just say it’s not the drones we should fear.

Jumping to the statistics, below are the leading causes of unintentional deaths in the United States in 2014. I’m not listing the health-related version because, as you might guess, it’s not a fair comparison given the context of this post.