Shitty news. I hate the government. While I worry about people abusing the photo capabilities, the government has no business here. We need good old fashioned wild west justice back.
The photo capabilities are greatly exaggerated for consumer level multi rotors. There are some that can do amazing things, but they are $10k investments and probably beyond what most peeping toms are willing to spend. You can also find that most "peeping Tom" claims have turned out to be cases of mistaken intention. example: there was a woman who called 911 because she woke up to find a "drone" spying on her through here 13th floor bedroom window. Front page news of the evil drone infestation. After a very short investigation it was determined that it was being used to inspect a construction project taking place across the street and the video and flight log showed absolutely no interest in her or her building. That was back page news.
All they had to do was put some sort of restricted airspace over private property for so many feet. That would give some grounds for addressing peeping toms and nosy neighbor's (ETA: and police)
As long as I have the right to shoot down drones hovering over my backyard w a camera then I don't really care about the rest. The ownership of that airspace should be defined the same as mineral rights so it's unambiguous.
See above regarding peeping toms. I can see some merit in the airspace discussion, but there's probably a whole nother threads worth in that.
Shooting down: as of now there really isn't any legal grounds for shooting a drone outside of normal self defense situations in which I don't believe it would be covered. Especially since the FAA likes to consider them aircraft now. Not debating rights here, just legalities. The other issue is similar to above, you have to know what they are looking at. Not really hard to tell, if they are close enough to see anything then you should be able to clearly see where the camera is pointing. This side of the topic usually gets heated pretty quick. Especially when less reasonable people start chiming in.
Sent from my HAL 9000