Fighting for droneless privacy
Drones are becoming a part of everyday life. They’re already useful for taking great bird’s eye view photographs and videos, and will be used more and more for other high-flying tasks such as deliveries and inspecting skyscrapers and other tall structures.
But let’s face it – drones are also kind of creepy. No one wants to think about a tiny flying spy peeking over their fence or into their office window. Least of all the folks at startup Dedrone, whose mission is to help customers detect unwanted drones. And with the FAA estimating that there will be 7 million drones sold by 2020, Dedrone will have its work cut out for it.
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Can’t you just shoot it?
Ironically, in order to protect you from unwanted surveillance by drones, Dedrone uses a scanners, sensors, and yes, cameras, to monitor air activity. We’ve already covered stories of disgruntled neighbors taking security into their own hands and shooting down drones from their yards. Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, a major investor in Dedrone, points out that a drone “can still cause a lot of damage if you shot it out of the sky.”
Senkut likes that Dedrone offers a “safer option to communicate with the pilot first,” as Dedrones monitoring systems can not only locate the flying drone, but its operator as well.
Who is so worried about drones?
Dedrone has been around for a year and has already installed monitoring systems for 200 clients. They’ve been hired by wealthy homeowners, political figures, and sports stadiums, and monitored two of last year’s presidential debates.
But most of their customers are using Dedrone to protect data centers, which are particularly vulnerable.
According to Dedrone CEO Jorg Lamprecht, most data centers “have a rooftop installation with cooling elements. If a drone crashes into this, you can break down a whole data center in seconds. That’s with a $500 commercial drone flown by an amateur, or in a deliberate attack. They have had guards with machine guns on the ground, but now they need to watch the skies.”
