Smile, a satellite could be watching you
It didn’t take long: in 2019, when satellites started to be put massively into LEO, or Low Earth Orbit, there was immediate speculation that they would be used to spy on us; we now have a private company, Albedo, capable of doing just that.
The number of satellites in the lower layers of the atmosphere is expanding fast. In addition to the race between Starlink and other companies, which aspire to maintain tens of thousands of satellites covering almost the entire surface of the Earth for purposes such as telecommunications, a growing number of satellites are being used for high-resolution imaging.
Albedo, which claims it can’t identify the people it photographs from the images, provides assistance in emergency situations such as fires or natural disasters (it is licensed by NASA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, NESDIS), but its surveillance potential is clear to anyone. The company’s website makes no mention of any privacy issues, citing uses related to agriculture, urban development, insurance and investment, supply chain, sustainability, defense and…
