You can neither stop who looks in your open windows, nor can your neighbors stop you from standing in yours.
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I wouldnât be happy about it, but Iâd like to think Iâd be consistent. Just as I side with the need for search warrants, but wouldnât by happy if the murderer of my family member was freed due to the âtechnicalityâ of the cops lacking one. The laws that protect all of us sometimes protect assholes and asshole behavior tooâŚ
I wouldnât want some creepy guy showing pictures of my kid in their bathing suit at the beach, either. But if it doesnât break some more specific law (child pornography, stalking, etc.) and the picture was taken without trespassing on my property, through an open window, Iâm not sure Iâd want a law prohibiting my right to take pictures of things in clear public view as the remedy.
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breaking news, with the right sensors so is any other material commonly used in construction
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Really? Thatâs exciting breaking news. What sensor will make brick, aluminum, foam, plastic, wood, gypsum, paper, and paint transparent? Iâd love to learn about it.
You know what could be fun? A couple of RTL-SDR dongles with shared clocks to get coherent signals, an antenna array, and using naturally occuring cellphone signals for passive radar imaging of the area. This stuff not only gets through walls, but also (unlike wifi) is within the range of the $20 receivers.
Brick, foam, plastic, wood, gypsum, paper, paint - radio frequency waves.
All of them - xrays, (to a degree) acoustic waves, muons, magnetic fields.
The resolution for many will be most likely crap, but certainly more than enough for an art project.
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I think the general answer for some of those concerns will be that âreasonable expectation of privacyâ does not apply if the person is able to be heard or seen via ânormalâ human senses from a public or private space, but does otherwiseâŚ
Of course, ânormal human abilitiesâ is a bit fuzzy, and the question of how much zoom can a camera have, or boost can a microphone have, before it falls out of that range will be tricky. But⌠I should NOT be allowed to use, say, a heat sensing device to spy on my neighbors through their walls, or listen to them via parabolic microphone aimed at their house, or snap pictures with a drone over their backyard. Those go beyond normal human abilities/senses, and therefore violate the âreasonable expectation of privacyâ rule.
Snapping pictures from the street through an open window, not so much.
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Transparent⌠I donât think so. But thanks for trying.
Xrays are high energy short wavelength electromagnetic waves. They are not a sensor. However, if we imagine a very large magnetron on one side of a house and a house sized sheet of unexposed film on the other, you still would not get an image that looks like anything. That is far from transparency.
Nothing else on your list is a sensor either. They are energies which can penetrate a house. You still need a sensor to see something on the other side and all of them would not even resemble a house if such sensors where put in place.
Transparency is relative. You have to have a combination of energy source, material, and energy sensor to even start talking about it with anything resembling accuracy.
None of what I said in a direct reply to you is a sensor, that is true. However, the energies/wavelengths I hinted upon have their corresponding sensors paired to them. In the earlier answer I even supplied an example, an antenna array of coherent receivers, for the sensor - and cellphone towers (or, unspecified but also usable, radio broadcasting towers) as illuminators. For the muon radiation, the space itself is a good source, albeit the integration times are long.
How would you define transparency?
Actually, thatâs legal, at least if you move the drone high enough that it isnât technically in their yard but can see in. There have been a bunch of cases.
Legally, I think it is âtransparent to my eyeballs or my earsâ or devices that do facsimiles of the same thing. You get into legal questions on the edges of range where you go beyond human ability (zoom, parabolic mics, etc.).
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Iâm a bit on the fence on that one, actually, since planes and helicopters have been a reality for years, and as such, is it really reasonable to expect your yard not to be potentially viewed from above? Drones are just a new, cheaper way for the âpublicâ space above your house to be accessed, so⌠yeah, I can see the logic there.
You can be on the fence but the legal cases so far? The drone operators have won, as far as I know. Drones peeking over fences and directly in higher than ground floor windows. There was one in Seattle last year, as I remember. Yeah, I believe the plane precedent (and helicopter) has been cited as well. I do think they arenât allowed to have the drones in your yard but how far up your yard legally extends is limited (but I donât recall the height).
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I should use âTransparency is operating in such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed.â since it completely invalidates all methods you propose for making a house transparent.
But I could also use âthe physical property of allowing light to pass through the material without being scatteredâ I like that too since all of your methods either pass through the house without effecting it as in the case of muons or are scattered to the point of no longer being transparent like your other examples.
I think the simple English definition is enough âallowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen.â
The problem here is that you have decided to argue something pointlessly instead of remaining reasonable. Going off the rails an imagining that when someone says glass is transparent is an opportunity to show you have read a few things and believe you can demonstrate they are wrong⌠well thatâs just trollish behavior. It furthers nothing and means nothing. The issue at hand is one of window glass and how some people think that you and I donât have the right to photograph whatâs visible on the other side of them.
As a drone owner and operator, I pay attention to this stuff a bit.
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But what about in urban areas, with lots of condo buildings, where your neighbourâs window across the street looks directly into your higher floor window?
What cultures? The one Iâm in is pretty clear that if you donât attempt to cover your windows, you are allowing people to look in.
How does the altitude of your window burden me with the responsibility to not look?
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I have a baby one, with a camera, but so far all my videos are blurry ones of family members or dogs running for their lives, ending with a still shot of a tree limb or roof top.
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I believe you meant to quote @zathras on that one 
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You donât define âeasyâ. I can look and see. I can rig up a sensor array over a weekend. I can buy a $200 cellphone thermal cam (the $300 sparkfun dev kit is on the way). Whereâs the cutoff and why? Unaugmented human senses? Sub-$1000 off-the-shelf tech?
You donât define âlightâ. Do you mean the nanometer range accessible to unaugmented human eyes, with angular resolution corresponding to unaugmented human eyes?
âŚand isnât it âwithout affecting itâ? English can be a pretty accurate language but you have to use it accordingly.
The muons are actually absorbed/scattered by the house. In a small but distinct amount.
Who defines âreasonableâ, how, and why?
Or, given the rapid progress of available technologies (check for homemade phased array radars, for examples of nice proof-of-concepts), it is a forward thinking.
Itâs amusing how wavelength-limited can peopleâs thinking become when it is about visibility. The humble windowglass is for example completely opaque to far-IR thermal cams. And they are now available off the shelf for cheap(ish). So not entirely a too far-off issue.
You sound irritated, may I ask why?
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