Consumer and commercial drones are used for all sorts of creative purposes, some of these in an artistic sense, others with a different sort of creativity.
A recent example of the latter is part of a growing and arguably insidious trend in corporate surveillance of consumers.
Just a few days ago, a Modesto, California woman named Joan Van Kuren, who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars renovating her home, found herself shocked and furious at receiving a letter from none other than her home insurance provider, CSAA Insurance Group.
The cause of her anger would be understandable to any homeowner: The company insuring her house explained in the letter that it would be dropping her insurance policy because of what it labeled unacceptable hazards and liability exposure on her property, caused by recent home renovations.
When Van Kuren called CSAA to ask why they claimed this, she was even more shocked to discover that they’d based their decision on footage from a drone the company had flown over her home.
As Van Kuren explains to CBS Sacramento, “It almost feels like someone’s looking in your windows, you know, when they tell you that they flew a drone over your home and looked at it. It’s like, whoa,”
Moreover, she hadn’t even done anything to cause CSAA any financial outlay. Instead, as a customer for 40 years, Van Kuren herself estimates that she had paid out over $80,000 in fees.
During the last three years before the letter, she had invested in renovating the whole property inside and out.
The claimed cause of CSAA’s decision to drop her as a client was a load of clutter along the left side of the house which remained from this being the last part of the property to be renovated.
This so-called risky clutter consisted of an old planter and some tires, and Van Kuren wasn’t even given an opportunity to remove them before simply having her policy canceled.
All of that aside from the drone surveillance shenanigans by CSAA.
When asked by CBS Sacramento about Van Kuren’s case, CSAA denied that it flies drones despite what one of its reps had told Van Kuren over the phone.
However, The company did make ambiguous excuses about using “several sources of information to assess the condition of properties, including aerial imagery captured by third-party, fixed-wing aircraft and satellites.”
The specific truth of such a vague statement is hard to assess, and in any case, makes little difference for Van Kuren, or many others who’ve been subjected to similar insurance provider decisions.
Also, regardless of whose drone it is, somebody’s snooping with it on the insurance company’s behalf.
Unsurprisingly, Van Kuren then canceled the car and business insurance policies she also had with the same company.
Amusingly, despite their conduct towards her about her home insurance, Van Kuren claims that a CSAA rep asked her, ‘Is there any conversation we could have to keep you?’”
Her answer of “absolutely no freaking way” shouldn’t surprise anyone either.
The fact that the company responded with an automatic policy cancellation without considering context or first just asking this particular homeowner to fix her supposed clutter problem should give anyone pause.
That this insurance company and others like it are also using secretive drone surveillance tactics to drop all but the least risky properties based on their own internal criteria should also give many consumers further cause for concern.
