On March 31, 2015, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a petition against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with the D.C. Circuit court asking that the court review the FAA’s proposed rule on commercial drone use, which was released in February of this year, for its failure to include appropriate privacy safeguards. While the FAA did say in December 2014 that it would indeed take privacy concerns into account when drafting the proposed rule, when it finally released the proposed rule in February, the FAA explicitly stated that privacy issues were “beyond the scope of this rule making.” EPIC’s complaint: “to hold unlawful the FAA’s withholding of proposed drone privacy rules, which Congress required the agency to issue under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012.” We will follow this suit and keep you updated on its outcome.
