Community Corner
Peeping Drone in Midtown Causes Privacy Scare
State legislators may take new action on a bill that would prevent drone users from invading people's privacy during the next session.
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The latest example of drones behaving badly: a Midtown woman claims she saw an unmanned aerial drone loitering outside her apartment complex.
Find out what's happening in Midtownfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
According to WSB-TV, the woman spotted the drone on April 22 and managed to record it with her cell phone camera. She told the station that she didn’t think the drone was doing anything except hanging around the Spring Street apartment complex, possibly looking into people’s windows.
State Rep. Patty Bentley, who supported a failed bill in the Georgia General Assembly’s previous session to protect people’s privacy from drone snooping, told WSB-TV that she would support the reintroduction of the legislation during the next session, which opens on Jan. 11, 2016.
Find out what's happening in Midtownfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
House Bill 5 made it as far as a second reading during the 2015 session, and would make it a misdemeanor “to use an unmanned aircraft to capture an image of an individual or privately owned real property in this state with the intent to conduct surveillance on such individual or property.”
The bill would make distributing illegally-obtained images created by drone aircraft a more serious and aggravated misdemeanor.
The New York Daily News reports that the Midtown drone incident is just the latest such run in with potential peeping automatons.
A drone operator tried to get his aircraft onto the White House grounds on Thursday, but was stopped by Secret Service agents before the flight began.
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