>With the capability to watch an area of 10 or even 15 square miles at a time, it would take just two drones hovering over Manhattan to continuously observe and follow all outdoor human activity, night and day.
This is not correct. Manhattan has tall buildings which are a great defense against arial surveillance. They also do not do active monitoring. So if you travel more than 10 - 15 miles, you would end up entering or exiting their surveillance radius, which means they couldn't link your entire set of actions together.
Further, the resolution is not very good. They can currently trace back cars and humans walking, but the features are not great. So if you were to board a bus and exit the bus, and you weren't wearing some very distinct color (or you took off your jacket), you would be lost to them.
The company that provides this service is called PSS. I do not like them very much. [1]
Shameless plug: We don't plan to do any surveillance, but at tensorflight.com we automatically detect a few object classes and our automatic human detector is almost ready. https://twitter.com/tensorflight/status/843606859399405568 , please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you are interested in this space.
They can track your location by looking at the current cell id of you phone connection (also a much better way of identification) so what's the point of these drones?
Also there are lots of CCTV cameras at every corner for tracking people without a cell phone.
This is not correct. Manhattan has tall buildings which are a great defense against arial surveillance. They also do not do active monitoring. So if you travel more than 10 - 15 miles, you would end up entering or exiting their surveillance radius, which means they couldn't link your entire set of actions together.
Further, the resolution is not very good. They can currently trace back cars and humans walking, but the features are not great. So if you were to board a bus and exit the bus, and you weren't wearing some very distinct color (or you took off your jacket), you would be lost to them.
The company that provides this service is called PSS. I do not like them very much. [1]
1. https://www.pss-1.com/