Pending SF policy could let city agencies launch drones
Pending SF policy could let city agencies launch drones
By Benny Evangelista May 3, 2017 Updated: May 4, 2017
4:53pm
Five San Francisco agencies, including the fire, port and
parks departments, could start flying drones under a set of rules that a city
committee is expected to approve Friday.
The Committee on Information Technology’s proposed drone
policy focuses on privacy rights, spelling out how any city agency or employee
can use a drone even for seemingly benign flights like search-and-rescue
missions or pier inspections.
The 15-member committee began studying the issue two
years ago after one of the Recreation and Park Department’s nine drones was
stolen from a city vehicle after just one test flight.
The crime alerted privacy-rights advocates to the fact
that the department even owned a fleet of camera-toting drones to assess trees,
parks and facilities. That fleet was grounded while the city developed an
overall drone policy.
“Departments must have an authorized purpose to collect
information using a drone, or use drone-collected information,” according to a
draft of the policy. The policy advises city departments “not to maintain
archives of raw, unprocessed drone data” once its mission is accomplished, and
says that any “incidentally collected” information that could identify a person
or private information must be deleted.
“We were making sure we are using them in a responsible
way,” said City Administrator Naomi Kelly, one of the city officials on the
committee.
Drone-law expert Steven Miller of the Hanson Bridgett law
firm said privacy concerns are driving adoption of such public drone policies.
“Those agencies who desire to use drones without such
policies in place have run up against considerable public anxiety over how the
government plans to use these drones,” Miller said.
But he said only time will tell whether a city agency
flying a drone might be brought to court for infringing on someone’s privacy
rights. A drone surveying treetops, for example, could snap a photo of someone
who isn’t doing anything criminal but doesn’t want to be seen at that moment,
he said.
If approved, the San Francisco policy itself doesn’t mean
the skies over the city will immediately be filled with small unmanned aerial
vehicles. Each department will have to draft its own specific policies and
reasons for using drones, and the technology committee retains the right to
revoke the departments’ permission to fly.
In the last two years, consumer drones have become so
popular that the Federal Aviation Administration has issued regulations
governing their use. More than 347 police, fire and other public-safety
agencies in the U.S. use the same type of consumer drones, according to the
Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York.
In the Bay Area, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, the
Menlo Park Fire Protection District, the Fremont Fire Department and the
Moraga-Orinda Fire District have active drone programs. But community concerns
over potential privacy infringement have so far kept drone programs in Berkeley
and San Jose from taking off.
In San Francisco, the drone policy covers five
departments that sought permission to fly: the Fire Department, the Port of San
Francisco, the Recreation and Park Department, the Public Utilities Commission
and the Office of the Controller.
The Police Department is not included. It “didn’t even
ask,” Kelly said. “They’re dealing with body cameras right now.”
The technology committee’s policy spells out different
specific uses, although all five departments can fly drones after a disaster or
in an emergency.
The Fire Department, for example, can conduct
reconnaissance flights over building fires, fly search-and-rescue missions and
use drones to shoot video during training sessions.
And if there’s a person in the water in distress off
Ocean Beach, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a drone drop a life jacket
over the person?” Kelly asked.
The port wants to use drones for marketing photos and
videos, as well as inspecting portions of piers that are “hard to see from
land,” she said.
Rec and Park applied to use drones for numerous purposes,
including construction management, inspecting properties, mapping, marketing
and environmental monitoring of “flora and fauna,” the policy said.
The PUC plans to use drones only outside of San Francisco
to survey city-owned water and power transmission lines that are in remote
areas on the Peninsula, the East Bay and along the Hetch Hetchy watershed, said
Mary Ellen Carroll, the PUC’s emergency planning and security director.
Using drones instead of sending workers into those
sometimes hazardous areas “would be extremely beneficial,” Carroll said. The
PUC hopes to begin using drones by the end of this year.
Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy
director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, was not
aware San Francisco was about to publish a drone policy. Speaking generally
about such policies, Ozer said cities needed to be fully transparent to
citizens about potential surveillance technologies.
“Drafting a policy is just one part of the process that
needs to make sure the right kinds of questions are asked and answered,” she
said. “Whenever you’ve got a drone used purportedly for one purpose, there
needs to be a very thorough conversation about how you are going to make sure
it’s not going to be used for another purpose, especially given the current
political climate.”
Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff
writer. Email: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny
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