Recognizing the Threats of Drone Surveillance. A Case Study

Nowadays, drone surveillance of human activities is becoming more and more frequent. On the one hand, this offers many advantages such as fast and reliable collection of information that can be used by security specialists to make better decisions. On the other hand, it carries many risks for the individual privacy as unlimited video footage can be stored in large databases for later processing. Considering the constantly evolving drone technology in multispectral sensing and surveillance applications, the issue of privacy is perhaps becoming more topical than ever. The motivation of this study was to understand how security specialists perceive the dangers and threats in privacy when using drones. Forty-three participants were asked to identify the dangers and threats of civil liberties, seeing real drone surveillance videos and record the relevant privacy issues. The results of the research show that identifying the risks and threats in the case of drone surveillance is not an easy task but requires proper training of the stakeholders.