Pretty much the same way I feel about Google Streetview? Or Google Glass?
[1] http://www.informationweek.com/applications/google-launches-...
Perhaps they could have made a ton of money, launching drones as a service for the likes of Amazon and the postal. Perhaps they should have monopolized the skies if the hobbiest drones werent interfering with the commercial prospect this technology offers.
Google is still in a good position to integrate this technology with their maps...
(Just thinking loud..)
Considering that Bezos understands drones and Google is competitor to Amazon and has been missing the quiet revolution coming, this isn't a surpising salvo.
However, as other's have noted, we already have remedies for those sorts of things, and things like someone filming via a telescope pointed at your house (you call the cops). I can get the slippery slope argument Schmidt is making, but you could make the same argument about just about any already-available concealable tech device, from radio transmitters to spy cams to the web cams in every laptop with exploitable software. We do have growing pains with all of those things, and so we inevitably get people that exploit them who the law isn't fully able to deal with (or even catch), but with all the benefits they also bring, it isn't worth trying to ban these things over that fact.
Mobile phones are already used as spy devices -- do you really think the camera and microphone are off? How do you know?
Most people plainly place their phones on tables after sitting, but would it be so shocking for them to carry a tape recorder everywhere?
Drones are so fragile. I can imagine lots of possible countermeasures. Hacking, jamming, shooting (slingshot will suffice), throwing a net over it spraying it with water, glue or abrasive powder, EMPing, blinding with laser, burning with laser, deploying counter drone.
Than again what can you do about flung poo?
I thing we should ban people from excitement handling. Let corporations wipe your ass.
One might wonder what kind of neighbors Eric Schmidt has.
There is plenty of legal precedence for civil and low-level police enforcement of complaints between neighbors. e.g. "Peeping Tom" over the fence would be actionable.
The fact that a drone is the tool used to commit the privacy breach doesn't change existing law with regard to expectation of privacy.
The "potential to 'democratise the ability to fight war'" point is misguided. 'war fighters' have been able to design and build various Remote Control Weaponry for many decades, and certainly predating WWII. The availability of a drone design on the internet might make production easier, but I don't believe internet publication is an enabling factor for weaponry.
If drones are outlawed, only outlaws will have drones.
What may be needed isn't laws and regulations, but a common understanding of what is and isn't acceptable for drones. There's not a lot of room on our planet; it's important for us to develop societal norms for where we want and don't want technology.
It's jarring to find popped helium balloons in the wilderness. I'd be sad and unhappy to see and hear drones flitting about our treasured mountains, and even in our city skies. We're tool-builders, but we must be careful with our tools.
Sure. People don't even seem to understand the rules of road and keep killing each other and themselves, and you're pushing for "common understanding of what is and isn't acceptable".
Most people who walk this earth are not as clever as you might think. Just because you're intelligent, doesn't mean that everyone else is.
It seems that the human race needs very strict boundaries and limitations. But then again, in the US it's normal to have a gun and look at how "common understanding of what is and isn't acceptable" is working with that.
It's obviously only a matter of time before some dipshit is going to fly a bomb into some embassy. I understand that this will be the "outlaw" doing this but nevertheless, if you're not able to prevent it, by outlawing it you have at least the option to prosecute when abuse takes place.
(shit, reading this back I sound like some right wing fanatic. I can assure you I'm not :).
But his suggestion is so completely asinine, it even directly hurts Google!
If this ever gains any traction, the question will arise why drones in the sky should be unavailable to private individuals but drones moving on the ground should be available.
You know.
Drones on the ground, aka self-driving cars.
This after Google makes a huge investment in robotics companies. Their future potential competitors in this space are in peoples' garages right now. This is Google pulling the ladder up after them.
Or, your neighbor spies on you with a telescope. Or he just breaks into your house and assaults you. I don't get the point. I fly multirotors responsibly for my own enjoyment, so screw you if you want to stop me.
On this subject, he has no particular knowledge or experience that anyone else doesn't have.
On this subject, his opinion is completely unremarkable and worth just about as much the opinion of an artist who draws graphics for a Cheerios box.
When people whine about "powerful white males" having too much say in the media, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY MEAN. There is NO REASON we should be listening to Eric Schmidt's opinion on something he clearly knows next to nothing about. There is no reason to fill newspapers and web pages with his utterly unremarkable words about drones.
If he were to talk about, say, search engines or advertising, then yes, it's useful. That's what he does for a living. But w/r/t to drones, he's just as dumb and fearful as 50% or more of the world out there.
Moving further into his ideas, they are about as thoughtful and deep as a goldfish bowl. His analogy about an angry neighbor is laugh-out-loudable. An angry neighbor can do all matter of things today with all manner of tools following the dispute he mentions. Should we ban all of them, too?
For example, > "It's got to be regulated. [...] "
Drones ARE regulated.
http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/
http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/uas_faq/index.cfm?p...
Roughly the same as I'd feel about them buying a telescope and pointing it in my bedroom window; really creeped out, film it and call the cops on them.
Really. We're meant to take this seriously now? Almost any technology can be abused. I can think of several ways to kill or seriously harm my neighbour with the contents of my cleaning cupboard if I'd the mind to - far worse than just being a creepy pest to them. Are we supposed to go down the EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! BAN EVERYTHING. route? The saving grace of society isn't that these things are difficult, it's that most people don't think as predators very often.
Who knows maybe your neighbour actually has a soul.
Same arguments can be used against handheld camcorders, smartphones etc.
It's almost as if Mr. Schmidt is speaking as a hyopcrite...
You mean if you throw them over your neighbor's house?
What an interesting choice of words.
He might want to read the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution (just as a good place to start).
I don't see drones being fundamentally different in any way that would make them impossible to regulate. The FCC is a great example: it's stupidly simple to interfere with radio signals but it's not a big problem because enforcement is taken seriously.
Sounds like he's trying to prevent the democratisation of an upcoming technology.
There are incredible opportunities for doing cool things with drones, but a framework for managing their use seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Umm, isn't that supposedly a good thing? There's a reason that most modern governments are composed of elected representatives to make military decisions.
When the tech (and materials, refab costs, etc) get low enough, suburbia is going to get a whole lot more interesting...
What we should start considering and making plans for is pooling our resources together in order to setup a system of public, open-sourced drones whose data is freely available to everyone, with an official, central repository backed up and stored at the NSA (after we open-source that and get a public API working).
Google's street view cars would no longer be needed. We could have a real-time digital duplicate of reality running using the NSA's resources. Anybody can plug in and 'teleport' anywhere in the world. Any crime that would happen would be recorded live, and emergency broadcast systems can be implemented.
Unfortunately, no person or company could profit from this publicly available data. Any monetized analysis tool would be duplicated and hosted publicly for free via the NSA web services. All open source and anyone can view and improve the code and master pulls can be voted on by the community.
This is great for location and mapping data, but what about taking it a step further and maybe we could use these drones as a sort of 'opt-in' activity tracker. We've heard of the military using gait detection from drones to track 'terrorists'. Well, how many people can one drone track at a time? Also, can it measure heart-rate, steps taken, breathes per minute, O2 levels, etc... There goes fitbit and fuelband...
This is just getting started, there's still traveling and shipping that can be freed and open-sourced...
EDIT: I'm not criticizing the parent comment. This is a legitimate question! (As usual!)
This is hard to believe. Let's recall that during the US investigation into the wi-fi data that Google captured, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said Google had "deliberately impeded and delayed" the investigation for months. Earlier this year, the UK Information Commissioner's Office ordered Google to delete captured wi-fi data or face criminal proceedings. Google had earier pledged to delete the data but actually failed to do so. Are these the actions of a company that takes privacy seriously?
Then there is Google's online reach which is simply phenomenal. Now they have an entire operating system (ChromeOS) which could potentially track everything you do online. You can't even print to your desktop printer without being signed in to your Google account. We don't really know what Google tracks or captures because their vaguely-worded privacy policies don't tell us.
The most depressing aspect of all this? Most people simply don't care (including many in the tech community).
Most likely the vast majority of drones and drone owners will use them responsibly (yes I am being hopelessly optimistic here) and a few will abuse them. Periodically we will see horror stories about misuse of drones (e.g. Newtown) but short of a whole city being wiped out very aggressive restrictions will not exist.
Hobby drones are (relatively cheap), if the software keeps getting better, it might soon be possible for a rich person to virtually own an army. That's a lot of power for a small group or even a single individual to wield.
