Anyone planning on flying your drone to spy on secret military facilities, please raise your hand....
Rich,
Military installations are not the only issue, although there are morons that make it a point to record anything they can involving military or civil agency activities. Customer data security is a significant issue and those operating commercially that carry liability insurance are already aware their carriers want to know how that data is secured. There’s also an issue for those that are involved in “critical infrastructure” operations that involve coordination with state and federal agencies. All collected data has to be secured from point of collection to point of delivery.
A lot of people think that stuff is a joke. Our government certainly does not and prohibited the use of commercial off the shelf drones for data and operational security reasons. They have gone so far as to prohibit civil agency drones from being operated in joint exercises when such agencies arrived with COTS products.
Some might argue that all the imagery anyone could want can be obtained from Google Earth imagery. I can assure that is not so as Google Earth imagery is screened by governments to remove or obscure sensitive data before being released for public use. Although a satellite may be owned by a private company they got to their location only after agreeing to government regulations before they could by launched into space on a government controlled rocket. Even SpaceX cannot launch without meeting very controlled conditions. There are many military installations that are not visible in Google Earth and others where the image is many years old and not at all accurate, or having very, very poor image resolution. It’s not just images of a facility that can be an issue, there’s also “pattern of life” concerns where images can establish when activities take place, or how things are done, which can be and is used in corporate and government espionage, along with concerns of how, when, and where a player could assume outside control of a drone not in their physical possession.
Sorry, but the average Joe Blow is both myopic and topical and lacks the ability to understand the ramifications of anything that’s not directly in front of their nose, and often even manage to screw those things up. They often don’t “think ahead”. We see blatant examples of that every time we drive with other cars on the highway.