LOS ANGELES: Daniel Garate’s career came crashing to earth a few weeks ago. That’s when the Los Angeles Police Department warned local real estate agents not to hire photographers like Garate, who was helping sell luxury property by using a drone to shoot sumptuous aerial movies. Flying drones for commercial purposes, the police said, violated federal aviation rules.

“I was paying the bills with this,” said Garate, who recently gave an unpaid demonstration of his drone in suburban Woodland Hills.

His career will soon get back on track. A new federal law, signed by the president Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors – from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises fresh worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below – and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns such as midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue.

U.S. courts have generally permitted surveillance of private property from public airspace. But scholars of privacy law expect that the likely proliferation of drones will force Americans to reexamine how much surveillance they are comfortable with.

“As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “I don’t think this doctrine makes sense, and I think the widespread availability of drones will drive home why to lawmakers, courts and the public.”

Some questions likely to come up: Can a drone flying over a house pick up heat from a lamp used to grow marijuana inside, or take pictures from outside someone’s third-floor fire escape? Can images taken from a drone be sold to a third party, and how long can they be kept?

Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Texas, near Houston, whose agency purchased a drone to use for various law-enforcement operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone cameras anyway.

“We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We worry about criminal elements.”

Still, the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups are calling for new protections against what the ACLU has said could be “routine aerial surveillance of American life.”

The language, which was inserted into a broader funding bill for the FAA, came after intense lobbying by drone makers and potential customers

Under the new law, within 90 days, the FAA must allow police and first responders to fly drones under 4.4 pounds, as long as they keep them under 400 feet and meet other requirements. The agency must also allow for “the safe integration” of all kinds of drones into U.S. airspace, including those for commercial uses, by Sept. 30, 2015. It must also come up with a plan for certifying operators and handling airspace safety issues, among other rules.

The agency probably will not be making privacy rules for drones. Although federal law until

now had prohibited drones except for recreational use or for some waiver-specific law-enforcement purposes, the agency has issued only warnings, never penalties, for unauthorized uses, a spokeswoman said. The agency was reviewing the law’s language, she added.

For drone makers, the change in the law comes at a particularly good time. With the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, where drones have been used to gather intelligence and fire missiles, these manufacturers have been awaiting lucrative new opportunities at home.

Want the rest of this article? Please visit original source!