Could you be the next homeowner to drop your policy due to drone surveillance?

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Home insurance is becoming more expensive and difficult to purchase nationwide, and now homeowners have a new concern: drone flights. As the cost of underwriting insurance continues to rise, insurers are taking more steps to limit their potential losses. One of these steps is the use of drones to inspect policyholders’ properties. This leads to a rash of landlords receiving cancellation notices due to drone footage.

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Imagine being a homeowner who dutifully paid the first few decades and never filed a claim. You might think this would make you the perfect policyholder. Then one day you go to the mailbox and find a cancellation notice from your home insurance company. What’s more shocking than the cancellation itself is the grainy drone photo of your roof that is cited as the reason for the cancellation.

This recently happened to Mike Arman, a resident of Daytona Beach, Florida. He told the New York Post that his policy was canceled after his insurance company flew a drone over his home and took photos that led them to claim his roof looked “damaged.” At least, that’s the explanation Arman’s insurance broker gave him, but Arman is still frustrated by the experience for a number of reasons.

First, Mike was an insured in good standing for over 50 years. Second, he felt that the photo the drone took of his roof, which prompted the cancellation, was of poor quality. He told the New York Post that the photo itself looked as if it had been taken from a significant distance by a “distant satellite.” However, the real kicker for Mike Arman is that his roof was only six years old.

In most cases, the lifespan of roofs like the one Arman installed on his house is between 20-30 years. Of course, he figured it must have been a mistake, so he contacted his insurer and asked them to send someone to personally assess his roof. After the insurance company told him they “didn’t do home visits,” Arman sent his insurance company documentation proving the relatively young age of his roof.

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Unfortunately for Arman, none of this mattered to his insurer, who proceeded to cancel them a few months later. The cancellation came at almost the most inopportune time possible. Florida has experienced a large-scale insurance crisis characterized by major insurers leaving the state, and the remaining insurers raising premium prices at an almost geometric rate.

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It left millions of Florida homeowners like Arman with no viable insurance option other than the state-sponsored Citizens Insurance Company. This time, Arman thought he would be proactive and hire an inspector to certify his roof. Despite getting the go-ahead from his home inspector, Arman got another nasty surprise in the mail as soon as his citizen policy was renewed.

Apparently, Citizens also uses drones to inspect homes, and after a flight to his home, they decided to raise his premiums by 25%. For insurance companies and their shareholders, this drone home inspection policy looks like a good deal. Drone technology allows them to “visit” more homes than they ever could in person, and with the increased cost of claims coverage, proactive risk mitigation allows them to continue operating.

On the other hand, homeowners like Arman feel that their insurers are “spying” on them and that the cancellation process lacks any real transparency. Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute (an industry-funded think tank) disagrees. He told Realtor.com that aerial photography “is a much less intrusive way to inspect your home than sending someone out to your property,” and he also believes it’s more accurate.

Friedlander concludes that drones can sometimes be wrong, but he says (without citing data to support his conclusions) that aerial surveillance is “10-20 times more accurate” than inspections by human eyes. Homeowners, on the other hand, are shocked to learn that aerial surveillance photo cancellations are even legal.

Albert Fox Cahn, who founded the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the New York Post that “Updated insurance regulations are needed. State law has not caught up with technology.” In the meantime, he recommends homeowners become proactive about removing potential hazards from their yards in preparation for drone surveillance. He said: “Don’t wait until you get a letter saying your policy won’t be renewed.”

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This article Could you be the next homeowner to drop your policy because of drone surveillance? originally appeared on Benzinga.com