The Dawn of the Shout Drone - shout drone.gif

In the pandemic, authorities aren’t using drones to surveil people so much as to
scold them.

more at
https://slate.com/technology/2020/04...ction_features

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpF7ENhJjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzMLzoLMPwc

The coronavirus pandemic has crippled the world, and drone users have spent the
past two months trying to figure out their technology can help battle the virus.
There’s lots of talk of using drones to deliver medical supplies and to sanitize
streets, but not much of this is happening in the wild. Mostly, we’re using
speaker-carrying drones to yell at people. The pandemic shout drone first hit
the internet in early February, when Chinese authorities used some to startle
grandmothers. Police would speak through the drone and tell people to wear masks
or to go home. Soon after, Italian, Spanish, and French authorities all fielded
their own shout drones for quarantine enforcement, and the rest of the world
followed suit. In the United States, authorities have used them in Daytona
Beach, Florida; Savannah, Georgia; and Honolulu. In Wyckoff, New Jersey, police
used one to sing “Happy Birthday” to socially distanced children.

Most speaker-carrying shout drones appear to be DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise models.
It’s a nifty, foldable drone first released in 2018 by the ubiquitous Chinese
drone maker DJI, and it’s used by both pros and consumers. The Mavic 2
Enterprise comes equipped with a one-way, 100-decibel speaker capable of playing
custom voice recordings, which allows the drone pilot to talk to someone on the
ground (or play a series of recordings). This is quite useful for people like
firefighters and search and rescue workers, who can use the drone to issue
instructions and orders from afar. Drone pilots also like to use it to scare the
snot out of friends with their backs turned.

https://www.dji.com/newsroom/news/dj...c-2-enterprise

In one light, I welcome the shout drone, because it is evidence that small
drones will not actually bring about total world surveillance. Authorities
largely aren’t using drones to actively track and punish people who break
quarantine, in the sort of terrifying and pervasive ways depicted in science
fiction and particularly breathless YouTube videos. Instead of using drones to
persistently monitor people, authorities are largely using them to periodically
yell at rule-breaking people in a gimmicky way, as a form of coronavirus
surveillance theater.

The coronavirus epidemic is demonstrating that small drones are lousy at doing
the type of nightmarish, persistent surveillance at scale needed to enforce a
quarantine. While I certainly could track a naughty quarantine breaker with my
drone for a bit, I would only be able to do so for about 25 or 30 minutes. The
quarantine breaker in question would almost certainly notice I was doing it
(drones are loud and covered in blinking lights) and respond accordingly. It is
also very difficult to ID individuals from even rather low-altitude aerial
imagery, so I’d still probably need to follow the person to their house (and
then I’d be stuck, since I can’t fly the thing inside).

To effectively do this type of persistent surveillance, you need a lot of
skilled drone pilots, a lot of drones, and a lot of batteries, all of which cost
money and time. If you’re trying to track people, there are simpler and more
effective ways to do it, like monitoring mobile phone use to simply tasking
someone to drive around in a car. Yelling at people with a drone occasionally
for dramatic effect—with the implication, perhaps, that you’re monitoring the
situation with a drone much more often than you actually are—is much cheaper and
easier to do. It would be even cheaper and more practical to just have a guy
drive around with a car and a megaphone—but that’s not the sort of thing that
inspires upbeat news reports about how we’re using technology to beat the
coronavirus.

There are, perhaps, some practical uses for shout drones. Police in Chula Vista,
a California city near San Diego, recently announced that they would consider
using their speaker-equipped drones to inform homeless people residing in remote
canyons about the coronavirus situation and the services that they may be able
to access. (As of this writing, they have not actually used drones in this way.)
According to a police spokesperson who I spoke with, the Chula Vista PD believes
that sending an officer on foot into these regions, as is their usual habit,
would be dangerous and time-consuming for their officers. They think that a
speaker-carrying drone can convey the message inexpensively and safely.

While this is not an unreasonable idea, there is still a central problem he
Shout drones are creepy, and creepy in a way that is alienating, in the midst of
a crisis in which human connection is both dangerous and critical. While I don’t
doubt that most shout-drone users have good and public health–minded intentions,
they must admit that they are still yelling at people with a flying, faceless
mechanical helicopter that looks like a weird bug.

The visual creepiness of shout drones is compounded by the fact that disembodied
voices are deeply disconcerting. The French critic and composer Michel Chion has
written extensively on the power and strangeness of disembodied voices, which he
dubs “acousmatic”— a “sound hat is heard without its cause or source being seen”
(which can describe mechanical objects, like radios or telephones or drones).
The voice itself he calls the acousmêtre, an invisible being that is a sort of
“talking and acting shadow”: a voice that you cannot attach to a face.

A casual telephone conversation with a stranger isn’t creepy because you are
expecting it the disembodied voice. But it’s different when the faceless voice
appears to have power over us or, even worse, seems like it can see us when we
can’t see it. Think of the inherent creepiness of speakers in public places that
issue commands but give us no visual information on who is doing the talking—a
concept that Aldous Huxley illustrated in Brave New World, in which the heroes
navigate a dystopia full of whispering, imploring, electronic speakers that
issue directions and subliminal suggestions.

While the police may reassure people on Twitter that their shout drones aren’t
actually capturing video, or stalking people, the public has no way of knowing
that this is actually true. All the public sees is a creepy robotic helicopter
that may be capable of doing or seeing anything and is speaking with a voice
that cannot be attached to a human being. It is not a recipe for fostering
public trust. During times of fear and uncertainty, human beings become even
more reliant upon personal relationships and trust—and more likely to lose that
trust, over time, in institutions that they believe have failed them during
their time of need. This is particularly important for especially vulnerable
populations, like homeless people and the undocumented, who are often already
disinclined to trust what authorities tell them.


more at
https://slate.com/technology/2020/04...ction_features



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