AI balloons are taking highly detailed photos of metro Phoenix houses, raising privacy fears

The day spent relaxing by the pool, there’s a chance your lounging might be caught on camera without your knowledge.

According to a new report in the Arizona Mirror, insurance companies are starting to use AI-powered balloons to take aerial photographs around the state, raising a fresh round of questions about the line between corporate data gathering and consumer privacy.

Jerod MacDonald-Evoy wrote the piece, and he joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: You have an example of one of these images in your piece. Can you just describe for us what it shows?

JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: So these images are taken from an area that would be kind of described as "near space." And they kind of just are able to show kind of very high resolution images of someone's property ... at a very high altitude, at a very high resolution.

DINGMAN: OK, and what exactly is going on here? How are these photographs being taken?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, so the company that is doing this, Near Space Labs, sends up what are called stratospheric balloons to lift these AI robotic pieces of equipment that they have that have these very high-powered cameras up higher than where you would see a commercial airliner, but a little bit lower than where satellites would be out in near space, hence the name Near Space Labs for this company.

And then once those balloons reach a certain altitude, they detach and they kind of glide down on parachutes and take a series of photos of a wide area. And ... these images are such high resolution that they're able to kind of crop in and zoom in and kind of get photos of a very wide area, but still be able to get photos down on a very small, granular level of a single house.

DINGMAN: And the idea, in part, for Near Space is that this is technology that insurance companies would use. What would they use these images for?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, we've already seen some examples of companies using this technology. There is one insurance company called Swiss Re that is using this, this particular company, and they're using it for property risk assessment.

Essentially, what they're they're doing is they'll have this company gather these photos of an area where they want to know what the rates should be or if they should be even offering coverage in an area that might be deemed too high risk for wildfire.

We saw this happen in California, where some homeowners were being told that their homeowner's insurance wasn't going to be offered anymore through their company. So some companies are now using this type of technology to determine if they're going to offer insurance in areas, or to say, "Well, the roof of your house ... is not up to code. You need to fix the roof of your house here or we're not going to insure you anymore."

DINGMAN: Now in your piece, Jerod, you confirmed that these balloons and this tech is already being used in dozens of cities around the state, including right here in the Valley.

But you also point out that insurance companies taking these kinds of photographs, that's not exactly a new thing — it's the scale that this technology enables that's new, right?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. Insurance companies have been using aerial photography for decades to create assessments of properties, or create these type of risk assessments as well, often using small, fixed-wing aircraft that they'll hire out to go take photos. You'll see these type of aircraft quite often flying in Arizona.

The difference is that this is at a much higher level, at a much greater scale, and it's also using artificial intelligence. So you have a kind of culmination of a bunch of different technologies that are happening at once that haven't really ever been used before in this particular space.

And that causes some people — like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — to have some pause about what this might mean for privacy concerns. You know, who are these companies, other than insurance companies, selling this data to and these photos too?

DINGMAN: Right, and you actually spoke to the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project about this, and they told you this is a pretty complicated question, right?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. It is, because if it were the government doing something like this, it would raise a pretty heavy constitutional issue. It would be a First Amendment issue pretty much right away. There would also be a Fourth Amendment issue right away where certain, you know, things would get triggered pretty quickly ... if this was the government doing this.

But when it comes to a private company, there are a lot less guardrails to protect the citizenry from what's going on here, and there's also a lot less transparency on this. We can't really see the internals. We can't make a FOIA request or public records request for what a private company is doing.

And the kind of interactions between private company and private company, or private individual and private individual, aren't exactly as open as, say, if a government was doing this sort of wide area photography. So it makes it a little bit more opaque on what we can know and what we can learn about how this is being done.

Now, Near Space Labs allows for users to request imagery that is taken. I requested some imagery. I have yet to get any imagery, and it's unclear what kind of imagery they would release and ... if they would show you their full capabilities just from this request imagery section that they have.

DINGMAN: Just about 30 seconds left here, Jerod. The company that makes this technology, which again, is Near Space Labs, they're also active in places like Texas and California. And in California, there's been an attempt to regulate what they are allowed to do. What is the status of those efforts?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, the regulation ended up getting held in committee. It didn't end up moving through anywhere. But that regulation would have allowed consumers to have a right to see the photos that were used to dispute change or cut their insurance. That bill got held in committee, didn't go anywhere.

But that bill was basically a direct response to this and other types of technology, particularly drones that have been being used to fly over people's property, take photos of it, and use those photos to kind of cancel people's insurance without really giving them an opportunity to have a say.

DINGMAN: Alright, well, that is Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, he's a reporter and wrote about this for Arizona Mirror. Jerod, thank you as always.

MACDONALD-EVOY: Thank you, as always, for having me on.