Nick Bilton’s neighbor flew a drone outside the window of Bilton’s home office. It skeeved him out for a minute, but he got over it. His wife was more skeeved out. She may or may not have gotten over it (but probably not). Bilton wrote about the incident for The New York Times, where he works as a columnist. Ultimately, Bilton’s story concludes that drone watching is no big deal, analogous to peeping-via-binoculars, and that the best response is to simply ignore drone-watchers until they fly their devices away. With all of this, I disagree.

Drone privacy is a fraught issue, one of the many in which slow legislative processes have been outpaced by technological developments. While there remains a paucity of personal-drone laws, the case precedent trends towards punishing those who damage other people’s drones, while protecting the drone owners who fly their devices into airspace around private homes. Through legal precedent, then, privacy takes a backseat to property.

Bilton spends the majority of his article parsing this legal landscape, and tying the extant legal battles to his own experience of being watched. He begins with an account of looking out his window to see a buzzing drone hovering outside. He is both amused and disturbed, as the drone intrusion took place while he was already writing an article about drones. He reports feeling first violated and intruded upon, but this feeling quickly fades, morphing into quite the opposite. He says:  

At first, I was upset and felt spied upon. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the opposite conclusion. Maybe it’s because I’ve become inured to the reality of being monitored 24/7, whether it’s through surveillance cameras or Internet browsers. I see little difference between a drone hovering near my window, and someone standing across the street with a pair of binoculars. Both can peer into my office.

Bilton’s response is basically “well we’re already constantly surveilled and always have been, so who cares if the technology is now aerial and our neighbors join the viewership?” Apparently, his wife cares.

Bilton concedes that his wife is far more put off by the neighborly drone visit than he.  She considers getting a shotgun, he reports. Though Bilton gives cursory attention to his wife’s view and ponders the legal options for people who feel violated by drones, he eventually concludes with this dismissive advice:  “do what I did, which was to wait about 15 seconds until my neighbor got bored and flew the drone somewhere else.”

First, drones and binoculars are not the same. Not even close. Although Bilton acknowledges that drones are unique in their capacity to “…reach into crevices of your home… and see from more invasive vantage points” he ignores their capacity for documentation.  It’s not just that drone technology grants viewers access to more and more granular images, but that images are produced, rather than merely experienced in fleeting (albeit violative) moments of looking. Binoculars archive voyeuristic images within a memory bank. Drones externalize the archive with the potential to distribute.

But more importantly, neither drone nor binocular forms of spying are okay. Ever. It’s positively strange to me that Bilton’s defense of drones entails equating them with analog forms of peeping. I certainly wouldn’t consider it benign to find a person hiding in the bushes across the street watching me in my bedroom. I doubt Bilton’s wife would, either.

Dismissal is a luxury, one that Bilton apparently enjoys. Although he presents a counter argument foiled in his wife’s experience, Bilton treats his wife’s account as just another opinion—a balance point rounding out his less affected reaction. He did not, however, investigate the reason he and his wife had such dissimilar reactions.  Had Bilton focused on the underlying cause of he and his wife’s fracture, the luxury of dismissal would likely have emerged. That cause, simply, is social position—in this case, gender.

The effects of surveillance are far from uniform. For many women, queer and trans* people, voyeurism has been and remains a reality to contend with and avoid. For people of color, surveillance is a key contributing factor in the disastrous rates of mass incarceration. Eschewing privacy has different consequences for different people. Those for whom the consequences are severe know this intrinsically. Those for whom the consequences are minimal can remain comfortably naïve.

Dismissing personal drones as technological objects that fly away after 15 seconds when their operators get bored ignores the staying power that those 15 seconds can entail. Such as the way those 15 seconds stay with watched subjects psychologically, imparting an omnipresent wariness even within the sacred confines of the home; or the way the 15 seconds stay with watched subjects as documented artifacts, distributed in ways over which the watched has no control.

For Bilton, surveillance is an inconvenient but inevitable reality. Pushback seems futile, so why bother? But intrusive surveillance is only inevitable as long as people acquiesce, and acquiescence can be most effectively disrupted by centering surveillance analyses on the perspectives of those at the margins—those for whom “inevitable” surveillance can be devastating.

Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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