President Obama to Issue Order on Commercial Drone Privacy

President Barack Obama is weighing in on the commercial drone boom.

According to Politico, President Obama plans to issue an executive order putting the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in charge of developing a set of privacy guidelines for the use of commercial drones in U.S. airspace. The NTIA will bring together industry professionals and consumer groups to publish “a series of voluntary best practices” for small unmanned aircraft systems.

No set timeframe regarding when President Obama would make his statement.

White House spokesman Ned Price told Politico, “We don’t have any details to share at this time, but there is an inter-agency process underway” to coordinate policy on the issue.

The NTIA will join the FAA as the second federal regulating group attempting to publish rules for flying drones in our national airspace. The FAA has said it plans to publish its first rules by 2015, though many industry experts believe the administration will miss this deadline.

Last Friday, a federal judge ruled that the FAA’s email telling volunteer search-and-rescue group Texas Equusearch to stop using drones to find missing persons “is not a formal cease-and-desist letter representing the agency’s final conclusion that an entity has violated the law. The [FAA] employee did not represent the consummation of the agency’s decision making process, nor did it give rise to any legal consequences.”

This marked the second such case the FAA has lost in court and further calls into question whether or not the administration can effectively regulate commercial drones.

We will have to see if the NTIA can exercise authority better than the FAA, but it may have a head start as many states have already taken it upon themselves to pass legislation regarding privacy and commercial drones.