Too Early for Administration To Contemplate Detailed Privacy Rules for Drones, CTIA Says
NTIA should avoid developing overly restrictive privacy rules for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), especially at this early stage, CTIA said in comments filed at the agency. CTIA said drones are at a fundamentally different stage than facial recognition technology, the focus of another multistakeholder group convened by NTIA. “Mobile technology is established in the marketplace and facial recognition technology is being deployed,” CTIA said. “UAS is nascent technology that has yet to be approved for commercial use.”
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On March 5, NTIA sought comment on UAS policy, preliminary to a multistakeholder process and meetings to be held in Washington. Comments were due Monday and hadn't been posted by NTIA on its website by our deadline. UAS can “enable aerial data collection that is more sustained, pervasive, and invasive than manned flight; at the same time, UAS flights can reduce costs, provide novel services, and promote economic growth,” NTIA said then. “These attributes create opportunities for innovation, but also pose privacy challenges regarding collection, use, retention, and dissemination of data collected by UAS.”
“Mandating detailed privacy mechanisms would be premature at this juncture,” CTIA said. "A principles-based approach would also serve all stakeholders’ interest in moving expeditiously. The UAS group can reach consensus on high-level principles and practices more promptly than detailed and prescriptive directives.” CTIA warned that briefings and demonstrations of drones before the working group would be of little utility. Information on the capability of drones today will soon be "obsolete," the group said.
Meanwhile, the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) asked NTIA to defer launching a multistakeholder process on guidelines for drones. “NTIA has failed to establish any legitimate or successful track record with its multi-stakeholder work designed to implement President [Barack] Obama’s Privacy Bill of Rights framework,” CDD said in comments filed at NTIA. NTIA’s “work on ‘mobile app transparency’ has not led to any significant new approaches by app and mobile device developers,” and its current effort on facial recognition has so “far failed to accomplish anything significant,” CDD said.
“NTIA has a major conflict of interest when it comes to privacy -- and it cannot in good conscience represent at all the interests of the public,” CDD said. As commercial “surveillance” systems like drones further evolve, the issue of privacy increases in importance among Americans, CDD said. The FTC as the country’s lead privacy regulator should oversee a process to develop a “meaningful set of privacy safeguards and proposed rules,” CDD said.