Your Privacy Is Important To Us!
Pixel Airways carefully plans each flight in advance to focus aerial pictures/video/images on the subject of interest in order to maintain the privacy of others. We use our unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV or drone) to create aerial photography for our customers and make reasonable effort to not invade a person’s expectation of privacy! We abide by all FAA Regulations and State Laws for flight and receive the proper authorization when applicable prior to any flight. UAV operators and observers are trained to ensure the protection of private individuals’ civil rights and reasonable expectations of privacy before deploying our UAVs. Our UAS operators and observers ensure and are held accountable for ensuring that operations of the UAVs intrude to a minimal extent upon private persons and businesses.
Please keep in mind that if the UAV is simply traveling over your property, but didn’t do any harm, then there are no damages and, therefore, you would not have a trespass claim under most states’ laws.
It It Legal To Fly Over Private Property?
Just like satellites and airplanes that fly over homes regularly taking pictures, the focus of our business is to take pictures/video/images of objects such as buildings and land, and in the process may capture pictures of people. If in the process of, for example, surveying your neighbor’s property from 300 feet in the air some of the images along the edge of the property may in include your property. We then review the images and make every effort to avoid utilizing anything that invades the privacy of others.
According to United States v. Causby, the Court set the limits of private airspace: If you own a house, your property rights extend 83 feet up into the air. Existing nuisance and invasion-of-privacy statutes would apply to UAV owners. If you could prove you were being harassed by a UAV flying over your house, or even that one was spying on you from afar, you might have a case against the UAV operator.
An “invasion of seclusion” may be committed by using mechanical means to oversee or overhear another person’s private affairs. An intrusion upon seclusion is committed when a person “intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person” (Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652B)). The standard for measuring whether the intrusion was highly offensive is whether a person of ordinary sensibilities, rather than a person with an extreme aversion to cameras, would view the invasion as highly offensive. Generally, a person in a public place has a diminished, if not no, expectation of privacy. Similarly, a person may have a diminished expectation of privacy on private property when in a place that can be viewed from a public area.
For example, the Oregon Supreme Court has held a plaintiff who was videotaped by a film crew that trespassed on his property did not have a claim of intrusion on seclusion because the plaintiff was in an area readily view-able from the public street.
