IANAL, but in the US, it depends on whether could have reasonably expected that their stuff was hidden. If your roof is sloped so that a person on the street could get the same information by walking around the block, then aerial surveillance is just a faster way to get that public observation.
In contrast, if you set up a high fence around your pool in order to sunbathe naked, aerial photography would probably be an invasion of your privacy? If your roof was designed in a similar way, one might be able to argue it was wrong for the company to observe aspects of it without permission. (Although they might have gotten permission via the insurance contract...)
I think this legal standard becomes tricky (or at least ought to receive more scrutiny) when we start talking about pervasiveness and permanence. Just because I know that an arbitrary person might take a picture of me in public doesn't mean I expect every single thing I do outside to be recorded forever by a technological invisible stalker hovering over my shoulder at every outdoor moment.
Privacy in the US is defined as property rights, and your private property does not extend infinitely upwards into space. Anything over a certain high is public and regulated, and so if it is visible from above, it is not protected.
Otherwise, it would be illegal to fly a plane or even a hot air balloon pretty much anywhere, and even things like google maps satellite view couldn't exist.
Why then is the opposite true? Just playing devils advocate. Do you see the lopsidedness between the two? They [the 'rights'] don't extend infinitely into space. okay, fair enough. Why does theirs extend all the way to the ground? Exceptions / loopholes could be made to accommodate non-visually penetrable mediums and means, like weather technology. And if the government really wanted to spy on their own (as if), they could just say it was a weather balloon that had the legal clearance. if it ever crashed, I mean. point is, there's lots of language that could be defined in order to allow spying, allow air traffic, but not allow a telescope, nay-- microscope, effectively--of studying us down here on earth. while naked. (us, I mean, maybe them, too). the government is just going to do whatever the hell it wants anyway, just put that in the legal work, gov: do as you will. problem solved
question: can a spy telescope, when it comes to apertures, lenses, focal point and scale, but most importantly perhaps, intent, be considered a microscope depending on which way its pointing? it seems to me that given the size of earth, the size of humans in realtion to that, how is it any different than monitoring a bacterial colony Wirth a microscope? functionally. its not different, right? or perhaps its more nuanced than functionally, but surely its closer to being a microscope, than a "telescope"?
street maps could definitely still exist. I saw a project here on hn that showed a land surveying satellite that was able to track land parcels and shade them accordingly using AI. and, if they can blur faces out I know they can blur rooftops and naked bums.
I work in privacy (as a dev, so the breadth of my knowledge isn’t necessarily comprehensive), and to my knowledge there’s no privacy regulations that would prevent this. Effectively, they’re saying that the roof at a certain address is in a certain condition. I don’t see how that could be considered personal data.
Why is that the real question? Shouldn't the real question be: do we want, as a society, to allow something like arial photography of your roof freely accessible to data brokers so that they can form a shadow profile of you and determine how much you pay for insurance?
That a law against such a practice does or does not exist today is rather besides the point.
