Creating a Drone 'No Fly Zone' Above Your Home Is an Entirely Ridiculous Concept

​ It's understandable why people wouldn't love the idea of a drone flying over their home. It's hard to comprehend, however, why anyone would​ ever want to use No Fly Zone, the latest company trying to cash in on the drone craze.

The idea here is to create a database of people who don't want drones flying over their house, then to give that database to drone companies, who will program their drones to automatically avoid houses on the database. (DJI, who makes the popular Phantom II drone, already has a GPS-based no-fly system in place.)

The startup has  ​gotten widespread coverage from ​major tech blogs and ​news outlets around the country, with ​very little skepticism. But the concept is nonsensical on many levels.

Why, exactly, would someone who presumably values her privacy give away her name, email, and home address to a third party company of no repute, so that it can be published in a database? And why are drone manufacturers allowing a third party to decide the capabilities of their drones?

Ben Marcus, the founder of No Fly Zone, did not respond to multiple requests from me across multiple channels for an interview, but did answer questions on a drone legal advice Facebook group I am a member of. Right now,  ​only minor drone manufacturers are on board, but that hasn't stopped his idea from gaining lots of traction.

He said that the company will not "provide name, e-mail, or physical address information to anyone. We only provide the latitude/longitude of no-fly zones."

The problem with this thinking is that longitude and latitude should be enough to identify people, and he noted that the data would also be put out as a free map. Marcus is a former airplane salesman and flight instructor, but has no background in privacy.

That alone should be enough to scare most people away from registering, but there are other reasons to be skeptical of No Fly Zone's mission, and to worry about the minor drone manufacturers who are going along with it. (No Fly Zone does not work without manufacturer cooperation, because they have to program their own drones to avoid the coordinates collected by No Fly Zone.)

The move is reminiscent of one DJI, the most popular drone manufacturer in the world, just made when it issued a software update to prevent its drones from flying in Washington DC after a government employee landed on at Obama's house.

Drone manufacturers policing the capabilities of what their drones can do does not set a good precedent. The Electronic Frontier Foundation—a group that is staunchly pro-privacy— found itself in the weird position of defending drone owners after DJI's decision, because manufacturers could start changing the capabilities of their drives after a consumer buys one.

The move "reinforced the notion that people who 'own' these drones don't really own anything at all. The manufacturer can add or remove features without their agreement, or even their knowledge," Parker Higgins, director of copyright activism there, wrote.

It's one of the first instances of drone Digital Rights Management (DRM)—the ability for manufacturers to change the features and functions of its products after consumers have them. Imagine a drone that is able to perform acrobatics after it gets out of the box, then suddenly can't do them anymore unless you pay a fee to "unlock" them, for instance.

But what No Fly Zone is proposing is even worse than that. Consumers are losing control of their drones based on the opaque methods of a third party that's already operating under the odd idea that people need to give up their privacy (to them) in order to protect it (from drone operators).

Consider: If the longitude and latitude settings are wide enough to obscure an address or identity, how is it going to be accurate enough to avoid creating no fly zones where they shouldn't exist?

"The fate of small drone flights over DC may seem like a little thing—a spat worked out among private players," Higgins wrote. "But these small battles shape the notion of what it means to own something and illustrate the growing control of manufacturers over user conduct."

Something probably should be done about drone privacy issues. But a for-profit third-party startup is not the one who should be handling this issue.

The idea of self regulation in the industry isn't a bad one, and drone operators should certainly fly reasonably. Flying over other people's houses, especially people who have explicitly said not to, is a jerk move. That said, it's almost certainly not illegal to do it.

It's the Federal Aviation Administration's job to regulate it, and it's still an open question as to who actually "owns" the airspace. Drone manufacturers' participation with No Fly Zone means their consumers' flying will be regulated by a businessman with no privacy background, a guy who's asking naive, privacy-minded people to buy into his idea, all-the-while asking them to give him a lot of personal information, which he is going to publish. What could go wrong?