With an aim to figure out a ‘Comprehensive national policy’, the Australian government has released a consultation on how Drones are being used in their region and what bad can be expected from the flying devices.
On an additional note, the 68-pages reference book also shared some interesting insights that are discouraging. Like the Australian government doesn’t have an exact figure of how many commercial drones are operating in the region and has cited an amorphous figure between 50,000 to one million.
As the paper highlights some good and bad aspects of the drone usage, the one that captured the attention of many readers is that these devices can turn invasive and can create a catastrophic collision mid air and can also cause an unauthorized access of critical info, intellectual property and help hackers interpret data sent over unencrypted communication links.
Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald that published some insights from the paper mentioned nothing about the Chinese Company DJI that is offering commercial drones manufactured in Shenzhen to the populace.
“A lot of data is being transmitted by drone operators to servers operating in Sydney and Melbourne and we never know how much information is being snooped in between or being transmitted to remote servers”, said Col. John Venable, a retired US Air Force Pilot now working as a freelancer in Australia.
What if the drones are capturing data like geolocation capabilities and helping the hackers to map the cities’ added Col. Venable.
Note- In the year 2019, the US Government put forth allegations on DJI that it was sending data back to china as per the Chinese law that pressurizes local companies to cooperate with national intelligence under the 2017 National Intelligence Law.
“But DJI denies all allegations and states that its customers can fly the drones without a web connection and have been provided with the option on how their videos, photos and flight info is been collected, stored and transferred. So, where’s the question of data breach and privacy concerns”, said Adam Welsh, Policy Director, DJI Asia Pacific.
