Can drones help win the fight against coronavirus?

Drones have never been uncontroversial. But like many other technologies - mobile phone tracking, robots, security scanners - they are taking on a new dimension during the coronavirus pandemic.

Anything that prevents people from having to come into close quarters with others is potentially beneficial. But the prospect of airborne surveillance drones hovering over crowds, taking temperatures and monitoring people’s behaviour is alarming - and it may also be ineffective.

In the UK, projects have so far been mostly limited to delivery uses. In Scotland the NHS has begun trialling an effort to deliver protective gear and coronavirus tests to the Isle of Mull, cutting a journey of over an hour to just 15 minutes.

But drones have also been used as a tool for surveillance and judgment by UK police forces. Derbyshire Police caused a stir early in the UK lockdown when it published videos on Twitter taken from a drone of small groups hiking in a remote beauty spot.

In New York, police investigated after a vigilante drone pilot flew over a riverside park telling people to socially distance. “This is the Anti-COVID-19 volunteer drone task force," blared a message from a loudspeaker. "Please maintain a social distance of at least six feet. Again, please maintain social distancing."

In deliveries at least, there is evidence that regulators in the US and around the world are convinced by the technology’s usefulness, so much so that projects have been fast-tracked.

The US Federal Aviation Authority, historically conservative and safety-focused, has been a thorn in the side of tech companies itching to get their drones off the ground.

In San Diego, Uber’s long-awaited efforts to deliver McDonald’s by drone did not meet the company’s self-imposed deadline last summer because it had not been approved by regulators in time.

But while hamburgers are a tough sell, the FAA has on occasion been quick to give out exemptions to companies using drones for Covid-related reasons, perhaps in response to a March directive by the President for all industries to cut their red tape as much as possible to help with the virus response.

There are hopes that Covid-19 might offer an opportunity for the industry to prove itself useful, especially as many companies are struggling with the cancellation of the weddings, events and photoshoots they rely on for day-to-day income.

In April it issued its first waiver to the commercial drone regulations known as Part 107, approving in less than a day an application from an oil and gas company to use drones instead of humans to inspect its facilities while staff were in lockdown.

This was a rarely-seen and highly-prized “beyond visual line-of-sight” exemption. At that point just 53 had been given out since applications began in August 2016.

Since then the same waiver has been given to a doctors’ network in North Carolina, Novant Health, which is using drones to deliver medical equipment.

“The whole Covid-19 ‘how are we going to solve this problem, how are we going to limit human interaction’ has pushed the FAA to consider expediting some of the drone delivery regulations,” says Tulinda Larsen, a principal at aerospace and logistics consultancy Nexa Advisors.

Earlier this month the UK equivalent, the Civil Aviation Authority, announced in newly-released guidance that it would be prioritising applications for beyond-line-of-sight flying that “have the most potential to mitigate harm from the Covid-19 outbreak”.

But there are also concerns that the impetus caused by the pandemic could lead to people’s rights being violated in ways that might not be considered acceptable in normal times.

“In a broader sense it’s one of our top concerns, because whenever there's an emergency, there's always the possibility that interested parties will exploit that emergency to increase their power, and that precedents that are set and practices that are engaged in, without some big conspiracy, end up become normalised and permanent,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Many of the same issues raised by other forms of Covid-inspired surveillance - facial recognition, mobile phone tracking, contact tracing apps which have the potential to morph into long-term health trackers - are also relevant to drones.

Police forces in the US and around the world have begun using drones to monitor and enforce lockdowns, raising fears of an Orwellian “eye in the sky”. Many of these came from the Chinese drone giant DJI, which gave away 100 drones as part of its Covid response programme.

Police in Colombia, China, and India have been using thermal imaging technology to measure body temperature and detect mask-wearing. In Connecticut, a programme to monitor people’s temperatures and the effectiveness of their social distancing was proposed but eventually pulled over privacy concerns.

In Europe, tougher privacy laws including GDPR look set to stymie some of the most invasive uses. Last week a French privacy group successfully sued Paris’s police department for its use of drones to enforce the country’s strict lockdown.

Some lawyers argued that Derbyshire’ Police’s decision to post the drone video of dog walkers on Twitter could also have been unlawful, because the hikers would not have expected to be filmed and the broadcast wasn’t necessary in the public interest.

In a blog post earlier this month, Matthew Guariglia, of San Francisco-based privacy non-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls drone use during the pandemic “the slipperiest of all slopes”.

“Even in a time of crisis, we must not normalise policing by robot. Videos of Italian mayors using drones with speakers to shout at people defying shelter-in-place orders are supposed to be funny, but we find them alarming.”

There’s no doubt that being watched from the skies is an unsettling prospect, says Stanley.

“I don’t think that blasting people’s images out on the internet is a great way to do law enforcement,” he says.

But the ACLU is not as concerned with the privacy impacts of drones as it is other issues, largely because it doesn’t believe the technology is advanced enough to be a threat.

He also doubts the effectiveness of temperature screening by drone, and with Covid’s wide range of symptoms and potential for asymptomatic transmission, spotting people who have a fever is a far from foolproof way to detect the virus.

“The uses of drones that we’re seeing strike me more than anything as a little bit silly. You have this very loud device with a short battery life that is not allowed to be flown at night, over people or out of the line of sight of the operator under FAA rules.

“You’re going to use that to try and detect people who are violating social distancing orders instead of just walking around. I think there’s an element here of people trotting out their toys to see what they can do.”