Recent drone invasion sightings in New Jersey have Trump up in arms. Here is the truth.

On By Littum

The hundreds of unexplained drones reported flying over New Jersey and other states across the East Coast in recent days have caused both confusion and anxiety. Who is flying these drones over homes, military bases and President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course? What do they want? And what are they trying to do – or find out?

After all, most privately owned drones are, among other things, flying high-definition video cameras. The uncertainty from these unexplained flying objects has sparked concern, temporary FAA flight restrictions and many, many conspiracy theories. Some of these reactions seem far-fetched, like speculation about Iranian spies. But the fear on the ground is real. There are at least two local politicians now calling on the military to shoot down unidentified drones. (We would not recommend it.) Even Trump has weighed in.

Fear of these unexplained flying objects is certainly understandable, as are calls for investigation and regulation of drone flights. There may be laws being broken here, and if no laws are being broken, maybe we need better laws. But at their core, many of the concerns here boil down to the need to better protect our privacy.

New Jerseyans — like all Americans — don’t want others prying into their private affairs, whether it’s via mysterious flying video cameras hovering over their patios, data brokers picking up their health and location data, or old-fashioned Peeping Toms. We don’t like it when other people invade our privacy – and for good reason. As I have written previouslyour privacy matters a lot.

Privacy matters because information is power, and information about people means power over those people, whether we’re talking about drone cameras watching us in our homes, social networks sharing sensitive data about us with advertisers, or artificial intelligence algorithms , which uses our data to generate scores about our eligibility for health insurancejob or access to loans.

To be sure, we already have a number of laws that protect our privacy from snoopers, whether those snoopers are tracking us online, following us home, or flying through the air. Old Intrusion and Invasion of Privacy protects us from unwanted intrusion into our private affairs. States—including New Jersey—often have criminal protections against unwarranted invasions of privacy.

In 2012 Rutgers freshman Dharun Ravi used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate Tyler Clementi and wrote about it on social media. Clementi later took his own life by jumping from a bridge, and Ravi eventually pleaded guilty to attempted invasion of privacy.

And it already is lots of rules for drone flightsdepending on how big the drone is and where, when and how high they fly. Even basic recreational flyers must pass a basic FAA safety test. Almost all drones must be registered. Thus, many of the current calls for the FAA to ban drone flights have less to do with the safety of commercial aviation than they do with more nebulous concerns about privacy, although unauthorized or unauthorized drone flights can certainly pose a risk for the safety of both flight passengers and flight crews.

Hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of this mystery soon. But at the very least, the New Jersey drone mystery should be a wake-up call. We need our elected officials to act carefully to protect our privacy from new technological threats, aerial and otherwise. Regardless of who operates these drones, they are at best a nuisance and at worst an invasion of our right to privacy.

And the problem is even more true for our digital lives. The United States are one of the few Western democracies without a separate, dedicated federal data protection agencyand state privacy laws that exist often receives a failing grade from civil society groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center. And this doesn’t even really take into account the new generation of artificial intelligence technologies that companies, governments, schools and universities are deploying to ingest and make decisions based on our personal data.

New technologies like drones can be fun – and they certainly have some useful applications for businesses and authorities. But hopefully this drone mystery will prompt lawmakers to more thoughtfully regulate these technologies in ways that allow us to enjoy their benefits while not sending entire states into full-blown panic.