Greetings, Future Tensers,
For some reason, whenever people worry about drones, they seem to worry about sunbathers. In an article for this month’s Futurography course on the alleged creepiness of drones, Margot E. Kaminski traces some of those references to accidental exhibitionists, proposing that they zero in on many of our most prominent anxieties about surveillance. “The problem with letting the sunbather narrative dominate drone privacy coverage is that it provides a woefully incomplete account of the kinds of privacy concerns that drones raise,” Kaminski writes.
Some of those concerns get a little easier to understand when you look into the ways drones operate in the wild. Slate video producer/editor Aymann Ismail tried to peer in on the private moments of some willing participants (that’s right, his boss let him spy on her). He found that his quadcopter was so loud, it was hard to use it without attracting notice, confirming a critical point made by Faine Greenwood in her article about drone myths from last week.
If we’re really concerned about privacy, drones might not be the right target. A Philadelphia-based computer science professor made national news last week when he noticed that someone (no one’s really sure who) had disguised an unmarked police SUV loaded with license plate reader tech as a Google Maps car. Meanwhile, Belgian police warned that Facebook’s new emoji reactions make it easier for the social network to track its users. And Stanford researchers showed that you can discern a great deal of personal information about individuals from their phone metadata. If anything, the relative obviousness of drones makes them far less problematic than some of these other surveillance technologies.
Here are some of the other stories that we wish we could inscribe on nickel plates this week:
- Government hacking: The Supreme Court recently approved a change to Rule 41 of the “Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure,” effectively giving the government permission to hack almost anyone’s devices, almost anywhere in the world.
- Internet magic: The Simpsons image quotation site Frinkiac just made it easier than ever to make GIFs from the series. Frinkiac’s creators talked to me about how it works.
- Social media: Do Facebook’s supposed political biases affect what you see online? Will Oremus explains the latest controversies.
- Wildfires: Stephen J. Pyne argues that the tragic Fort McMurray fires aren’t just indicative of climate change. They speak to a larger more global shift toward what Pyne calls the Pyrocene.
Reconsidering my hashtags,
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
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