Whether best practices for privacy, accountability, and transparency issues regarding commercial and private use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, should be written for consumers or lawyers, and whether they should encompass issues beyond what is required by law, were among the issues debated today by participants in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s multistakeholder process to develop those best practices.

The multistakeholder process is the outcome of a presidential memorandum issued in February that called for promoting U.S. economic competitiveness in domestic UAS use while protecting privacy rights, civil rights, and civil liberties (TRDaily, Feb. 17).  Harley Geiger, advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Carl Szabo, policy counsel at NetChoice, each offered a starting draft for the best practices document.

Mr. Szabo suggested that Mr. Geiger’s proposal was too long and too lawyerly, whereas he believed that the target audience is “someone who owns a UAV,” or unmanned aerial vehicle.  However, he said he “would love to incorporate a bunch of Harley’s points.”

Mr. Geiger said that much of the length of his document is due to using a chart format and printing it in landscape format in a large font size.  Laid out as a text document, it would only occupy about two and a half pages,  he said.

One participant suggested that there could be both a longer, more lawyerly version and a “too-long, didn’t-read” one-pager.

Mr. Geiger suggested that as originally phrased, Mr. Szabo’s proposal “says it’s OK to observe a person in a place they have a reasonable expectation of privacy under state law, so long as you do it secretly and they don’t know about it.”  Mr. Szabo accepted Mr. Geiger’s suggestion to change an “and” to an “or” to address that issue.

Ohio State University assistant professor Margot Kaminsky expressed concern that Mr. Szabo’s proposal “pushes us back to the online model” for informed consent about an entity’s privacy practices, which she argued doesn’t necessarily make sense for encounters between individuals and drones, which take place offline.  Later, she said, “The big privacy issue is that you have people walking around getting observed who aren’t in any kind of relationship with the people operating  the technology, … people who don’t have a real way of giving consent.”

One participant said that Mr. Szabo’s proposed document is “more of a plan for best practices, rather than best practices themselves.  All you say is you should have a policy, but not what it should contain.”  She added that defining best practices should go way beyond just following the law.

Another participant, however, said that the best practices should just be a guide to the laws that apply to drone.

Mr. Geiger asked, “Do you have examples of any best practices that are simply ‘follow the law’?” He added that all the best practices documents for technologies that he is familiar with “go beyond the legal compliance.”

Concerns were raised about how to define a news service, which Mr. Szabo’s document would exempt from many privacy concerns in using drones to report on news events.  Mr. Szabo acknowledged tensions in policy debates over stopping paparazzi from using drones while allowing “legitimate” news services to do so.  “I don’t know how to divide that baby,” he said. —Lynn Stanton, lynn.stanton@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily