For all the frequency I hear that "privacy is dead" or that "there is no expectation of privacy in public," we're constantly reading evidence to the contrary.<p>If you're such a person who despairs about privacy in that kind of way (I respectfully refer to all such folk as "privacy fatalists"), I wonder whether legal decisions such as this stir up your assumptions a bit? Don't you wonder if the future is actually one where, to borrow a quote from a famous legal decision, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places"?
Question for those who have more legal expertise - would this ruling change if the aerial surveillance were limited to just public areas? To me it doesn't seem like there is a reasonable expectation to privacy in public spaces that changes just because of observation over time. Yet that seems to be the line of argument made in this article.