The View from Above: A Survey of the Public’s Perception of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Privacy

ABSTRACT

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular, both for hobbyists and within the commercial, industrial, and military sectors. Approximately one million new UAVs have been registered in the United States, with the majority being recreational UAVs. This growth of UAV activity and their increasingly common public presence engenders a wide variety of opinions, perceptions, and concerns among individuals about UAVs, particularly concerning personal privacy. Drawing from the privacy and emerging technology literature, the purpose of this paper is to identify how individuals’ perceptions of privacy explain their attitudes on the use of UAVs and whether this aligns with what we would expect from an emerging technology. Utilizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for survey delivery to 2,108 respondents we conducted a descriptive statistical analysis of response frequency and t-tests of group mean differences. The results suggest that individuals who use UAVs, maintain a familiarity with the capabilities of UAVs, and have a basic understanding of UAV regulations, are somewhat less concerned about the growing presence of UAVs as it relates to privacy than individuals who are generally unfamiliar with UAVs, their capabilities, and UAV regulations. Policy implications of these results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• UAV
• drone
• regulation
• privacy
• emerging technology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Jake R. Nelson is a PhD candidate working in the Center for Spatial Reasoning and Policy Analytics at Arizona State University. He obtained his MS from Oregon State University in 2014.

Tony H. Grubesic is the college professor of policy analytics and the director of the Center for Spatial Reasoning & Policy Analytics, in the College of Public Service & Community Solutions at Arizona State University

Danielle Wallace is an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. She researches neighborhoods and crime, health, and organizational capacity.

Alyssa Chamberlain is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. Her research concentrates on neighborhood change and crime, mass incarceration, and prisoner reentry.

ORCID

Jake R. Nelson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9300-4892

Notes

1. The questions related to UAV users and privacy could potentially be combined to form a broader indicator of UAV use and privacy. We have chosen to keep them separate in this analysis to provide a more nuanced view of how individual perceptions of threats to privacy change with the type of UAV user.