Symposium on Drones.

• Author: Coyne, Christopher J.
• Position: Introduction

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned aerial systems (UASs), more commonly brawn as drones, are aircraft controlled remotely or autonomously via computer without a human pilot. Like past innovations, drone technology offers significant potential benefits through various commercial uses. At the same time, this technology makes governments more efficient at intervening in other societies and engaging in death and destruction. The four papers in this symposium explore the use of drones in the commercial and military contexts and engage various issues and tensions in each context.

The U S. Federal Aviation Administration forecasts that the number of drones employed for commercial use will increase from 42,000 in 2016 to more than 420,000 in 2021 (2017, 32). Commercial drones are already being used in fields such as aerial photography, construction and industrial inspections, real estate, and agriculture. The future holds further possibilities for the use of drones, such as the delivery of goods and the expansion of Internet access to remote communities. The commercial use of drones raises a host of issues related to air safety, privacy, and liability. The first two papers in the symposium address some aspects of these issues.

Ryan Hagemann begins with a consideration of the consumer privacy issues associated with the use of drones. His paper reviews the current U.S. legal and regulatory structure governing privacy and then considers how it relates to drones. He emphasizes the different types of data that might be acquired for commercial purposes and the difficulty of predicting all the different ways that drone technology will be used and how these uses will affect individual privacy. A key theme of his essay is that the privacy issues he addresses are not unique to commercial drones. Therefore, he argues, it is important that rules remain technology neutral instead of technology specific. Ultimately, the rules both formal and informal-that end up governing commercial drone usage as they pertain to privacy will emerge from the interactions of private citizens, private companies, regulators, and the courts.

Randall Holcombe considers the rules governing airspace to avoid conflicts between manned and unmanned aircraft. He argues that rules need to be flexible to incorporate not just existing aircraft but also future aircraft as technology continues to evolve. He proposes a simple rule change--mandating that drones be responsible for...