- The FAA announced new laws for drones.
- Google’s Wings Department not happy with the decision.
- New Law requires ID of drones/pilots widely available.
The US government has made the greatest single, most impactful number of steps to drone law this past week. In which it ruled that almost every drone in US airspace will need to broadcast its positions. As well as the position of its pilots.
In order to resolve national security and law enforcement concerns about the further incorporation of these aircraft into US airspace.
Google is not so happy about the decision
The company’s drone delivery subsidiary Wing wrote a rather hateful post. It says “Broadcast-Only Remote Identification of Drones Could Have Unintended Implications for American Consumers.”
That argues that the decision of the FAA to have drones broadcast their location will allow observers. Some other examples such as to monitor your movements, figuring out where you go, where you live, and where and when you get parcels.
Wing argued that this level of monitoring of their deliveries or taxi trips will not be approved by American communities. In practice, they should not consider it.
Two-Faced Wing Department
Wing suggests that their position should not be transmitted by drones. But, instead of broadcasting it locally, the Alphabet subsidiary instead wishes it to be sent over the internet.
Internet-based monitoring is basically what the FAA had initially wanted to do when, back in December 2019, it first proposed the Remote ID rules. Before it received a laundry list of arguments why internet-based monitoring could be challenging from critics and chose to abandon it.
Some of them are:
To begin with, the cost of attaching a cellular modem to a drone.
The price of paying for a monthly contract for cellular data just to fly a drone.
The absence of reliable cellular coverage in the entire US.
The cost of paying a data broker from a third party to track and store the data.
The risk of a violation of the third-party data broker.
Any which way, it’s going to be a while before we find out how safe or vulnerable these Remote ID broadcasts are really going to be, how wide or narrow. That’s because the final rule of the FAA does not explicitly mandate what kind of technology drones would need to be used for broadcasting.
Companies have to determine this for the next year and a half, and they have to apply it for approval to the FAA. The FAA is also clear that Remote ID broadcasting is only a first move, an introductory framework that indicates that in the future, internet-based Remote ID may still be an option.
