"The first unmanned aircraft of its kind to fly in the stratosphere, Zephyr harnesses the sun's rays, running exclusively on solar power, above the weather and conventional air traffic. It is a HAPS: a High Altitude Pseudo Satellite, able to fly for months at a time, combining the persistence of a satellite with the flexibility of a UAV."
You'd have to go back before humans to find a time before facial recognition was used to track individuals, yet people get upset about when facial recognition is used to automatically track and record all of your movements through ubiquitous cameras.
There's a big difference between a person going up in a balloons for a few hour to scout a military locations and a swarm of drones constantly monitoring a city in peacetime.
I was not making a judgement about whether or not there's a difference between a single balloon and a drone swarm (there is), but addressing the comment:
And also, in typical neo-luddite fashion, I'm fearful for the surveillance applications of this device. Even if staying airborne isn't eventually completely free (eternal flight) with this system, the ability to stay up for 9 hours at a time on a few Li-Ion cells opens up a world of possibilities, not all of which are great.
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Regarding your second point: https://www.airbus.com/defence/uav/zephyr.html
"The first unmanned aircraft of its kind to fly in the stratosphere, Zephyr harnesses the sun's rays, running exclusively on solar power, above the weather and conventional air traffic. It is a HAPS: a High Altitude Pseudo Satellite, able to fly for months at a time, combining the persistence of a satellite with the flexibility of a UAV."
This isn't a new idea, at all. You have to go back to the late 1780's to find a time before the use of balloons as recon platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning
You'd have to go back before humans to find a time before facial recognition was used to track individuals, yet people get upset about when facial recognition is used to automatically track and record all of your movements through ubiquitous cameras.
There's a big difference between a person going up in a balloons for a few hour to scout a military locations and a swarm of drones constantly monitoring a city in peacetime.
I was not making a judgement about whether or not there's a difference between a single balloon and a drone swarm (there is), but addressing the comment:
It looks a lot like you were saying these are similar. I'm not sure what else your comment could mean. What was your intended meaning?