On Thursday, I published a story about the police-tech giant Flock Safety selling its drones to the private sector to track shoplifters. Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now leads Flock’s drone efforts, described the ideal scenario: A security team at a Home Depot, say, launches a drone from the roof that follows shoplifting suspects to their car. The drone tracks their car through the streets, transmitting its live video feed directly to the police.
It’s a vision that, unsurprisingly, alarms civil liberties advocates. They say it will expand the surveillance state created by police drones, license-plate readers, and other crime tech, which has allowed law enforcement to collect massive amounts of private data without warrants. Flock is in the middle of a federal lawsuit in Norfolk, Virginia, that alleges just that. Read the full story to learn more.
But the peculiar thing about the world of drones is that its fate in the US—whether the skies above your home in the coming years will be quiet, or abuzz with drones dropping off pizzas, inspecting potholes, or chasing shoplifting suspects—pretty much comes down to one rule. It’s a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulation that stipulates where and how drones can be flown, and it is about to change.
Currently, you need a waiver from the FAA to fly a drone farther than you can see it. This is meant to protect the public and property from in-air collisions and accidents. In 2018, the FAA began granting these waivers for various scenarios, like search and rescues, insurance inspections, or police investigations. With Flock’s help, police departments can get waivers approved in just two weeks. The company’s private-sector customers generally have to wait 60 to 90 days.
For years, industries with a stake in drones—whether e-commerce companies promising doorstep delivery or medical transporters racing to move organs—have pushed the government to scrap the waiver system in favor of easier approval to fly beyond visual line of sight. In June, President Donald Trump echoed that call in an executive order for “American drone dominance,” and in August, the FAA released a new proposed rule.
The proposed rule lays out some broad categories for which drone operators are permitted to fly drones beyond their line of sight, including package delivery, agriculture, aerial surveying, and civic interest, which includes policing. Getting approval to fly beyond sight would become easier for operators from these categories, and would generally expand their range.
Drone companies, and amateur drone pilots, see it as a win. But it’s a win that comes at the expense of privacy for the rest of us, says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project who served on the rule-making commission for the FAA.
“The FAA is about to open up the skies enormously, to a lot more [beyond visual line of sight] flights without any privacy protections,” he says. The ACLU has said that fleets of drones enable persistent surveillance, including of protests and gatherings, and impinge on the public’s expectations of privacy.
If you’ve got something to say about the FAA’s proposed rule, you can leave a public comment (they’re being accepted until October 6.) Trump’s executive order directs the FAA to release the final rule by spring 2026.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
