There are a number of other platforms out there,
both in the air (such as drones) and on the ground
(closed-circuit TV cameras, licence-plate readers,
or even Amazon ring doorbell cameras), collecting
information about individuals, he says, “so at a
general level, satellites aren’t going to be the most
effective way to do it”.
Johnson adds that the place where privacy issues
are most likely to arise won’t be so much from the
satellite images themselves, but from the “big data”
consequences of “marrying” these images to ground-
based data. For example, he says during our interview,
“right now, I’m on a cell phone. The metadata is stored
somewhere. I’m also using Wi-Fi on my phone. I’ll go
to lunch and use my credit card. I’ll probably walk
through CCTV cameras. We’re creating a lot of data
in our daily activities.”
In other words, if you’re looking for something to
fear, don’t fear the satellite images themselves. Fear
the combination of how those images might be linked
up with everything else.
PJ Blount, a law professor and PhD cybersecurity
researcher at the University of Luxembourg, says that
legally there are two basic ways of dealing with this.
One is the US system, which is based on the premise
that anything in public view is open to surveillance by
anybody, including the government – although there
are laws that keep the military from using its satellites
to peer down on US citizens.
Many of the legal cases related to this, he says,
have involved the use of airplanes to spot marijuana-
growing operations or environmental infractions
by large companies, focussing on the question of
whether the government needed to get a judge to
issue a warrant in order to obtain the information.
That’s potentially an issue for the government, he
says, but not for commercially available information.“If anyone can buy the imagery, in the United States
there are very few limitations.”
Europe is different. It has a privacy law known
as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
which includes what has become known as the “right
to be forgotten”, prohibiting the accumulation of
individual-level cyber data on individuals who prefer
to avoid it. “In Europe, you have very good control of
your data,” Blount says. “You can call a company and
say, ‘Take it out’.” In Europe, he says, the company
will comply, but in the US, the answer is ‘No, I don’t
have to’.
According to Steven Freeland, a professor of
international law at Western Sydney University,
Australia’s approach is closer to Europe’s than
America’s, with the goal being to facilitate the use
of appropriately public data without compromising
data privacy. The law also calls for “an operating
environment characterised by ubiquitous encryption”- a good thing for preventing hacking, but not
for keeping government agencies who know the
encryption codes from using them.
“So,” Freeland says, “mixed signals... At this
point, Australia is not on the European Commission’s
list of countries outside the EU that have an adequate
level of data protection.”
Meanwhile, Pomfret believes that people
concerned about privacy should remember the many
benefits satellites have already given us, and realise
that the privacy issues with satellite images aren’t
all that different from those with anything else.
“My feeling is that lawmakers are going to be less
concerned about the platform and more concerned
about the data and how it’s used.”
RICHARD A LOVETTis a science writer and science
NASA fiction writer based in Portland, Oregon.
Issue 86 COSMOS – 47SATELLITE TECHNOLOGYThree tiny CubeSats are
ejected from the Japanese
Small Satellite Orbital
Deployer. The 10cm^3 satellites
from Nepal, Sri Lanka and
Japan were released into
Earth orbit for technology
demonstrations.