Law360 Quotes Richter and Aitken on Compliance Concerns for Drone Users

In its article “Autonomous Car, Drone Cos. Navigate New Compliance Risks,” Law360 has quoted Akin Gump communications partner Jennifer Richter and senior policy advisor Mark Aitken. The two discuss some of the compliance concerns associated with drones, amid an expansion of their commercial use.

The article reports that drones are currently being used for limited commercial purposes, such as media and entertainment, energy, agriculture, real estate, telecommunications, shipping, construction, and disaster aid and recovery efforts. With that in mind, it is important for companies to familiarize themselves with various drones to be sure they are the right models for any given task or operation.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all, so it’s making sure the aircraft is tailored to the specific operation you’re doing and doing your due diligence on that,” said Richter. “We know that a lot of contractors out there are using recreational drones that you can just buy off the shelf … [but] we like to suggest that that is not commercial-grade and that really needs to be rethought.”

As an example, Richter noted that recreational drones are not designed with the security and reliability required of a drone flying over critical assets such as pipelines or transmission lines. “Many types of recreational drones are operated on unlicensed bands, which aren’t secure. You can lose link and lose your drone and if it crashes into your infrastructure, whatever that might be, that’s a problem for you,” she explained.

Richter pointed out that it is also important for companies to have the right operational plans and manuals in place, running through those plans for any given drone task or mission, and getting their IT departments involved early on to work through privacy and data security practices concerning data collected from the drone. That includes figuring out what to do with data, especially if the information is personally identifiable, and determining whether there is enough server or cloud capacity to store that data.

Aitken added, “If you have corporate data policies, corporate privacy policies, those are the sorts of considerations that one needs to think through where you don’t necessarily need to write a privacy policy that’s specific just to drones. It’s more so just about the data that the drones are collecting.”