The magnitude at which spying technology has recently developed and become available to ordinary citizens is incommensurable with past concerns from the 1960s regarding the use of covert photography and eavesdropping. Two important developments are the increasing recreational use of drones ("hobby drones"), and the increasing availability of “spying products” such as smartphones, GPS trackers, optically-equipped watches, etc. Both these technologies provide for novel ways in which citizens can secretly observe and spy on one-another, particularly visually, orally, and location-based. This creates new privacy risks, including novel technical capacities in terms of recording, zooming, or extended access to public and -increasingly- private spaces. By going beyond the traditional remit of data protection law (and its focus on data flows), these digital spying practices seriously challenge the existing legislative framework, and call for new regulatory solutions.
