Drones should be restricted

There are laws in place to protect people’s privacy. For example, it is not legal for someone to walk onto your property and peer into your ground-floor windows. It is not legal for someone to place a ladder against your house to climb and look through your second-floor windows. It is not legal for someone to walk on your property and take photographs or video.

However, the law becomes a little unclear when you take the situations above and replace the trespassing person in question with a drone.

Thankfully, some states are trying to clear up any ambiguity.

In nearby New Jersey, for example, State Sen. Richard Codey is proposing legislation that would require drones sold in his state to be equipped with technology that would keep them from flying above 500 feet and from restricted air space.

Before commercial aviation and other technology were around, a property owner was entitled to everything on his or her land, including the soil beneath and the air above. Naturally, that changed over time, so as to not prevent airplanes from flying overhead.

Now, though, the availability and affordability of drones has brought into question just what should and should not be allowed.

We don’t want someone flying a drone over our house, or on our property, for that matter.

We like our privacy, and feel we are entitled to it. We also agree that, on a much larger scale, drones can present safety issues — as they did at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, a University of Kentucky football game and sightings around Newark Liberty Airport recently.

And while we hope our legislators pass regulations on drones in New York as well, we hope the federal government takes steps to pass federal bans and restrictions on drones, so people can’t just go over the state line to purchase a drone without the restrictive technology and then fly it over our house with no regard for our privacy or safety.