Proposed legislation would require law enforcement agencies to have a warrant or “extreme exigent circumstances” to use drone surveillance.

WASHINGTON – A proposed law will be considered by Congress that is aimed at protecting individual privacy from the rising number of government and commercial drones in use.

Introduced by Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., the Drone Aircraft Privacy and Transparency Act has been referred to the House Committees on Transportation and Infrastructure and Energy and Commerce, according to biometricupdate.com.

“What happens if there are drones that are gathering, through facial recognition, who is shopping on Main Street and selling that to advertisers?” Markey told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on future drone use.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) assembled a drone advisory committee, which Recode reports FAA Office of Unmanned Aircraft Systems director Earl Lawrence referred to in response to Markey. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published voluntary best practices guidelines in 2016, which recommends some similar steps to notifying the public of data collection practices as those proposed in the Act.

The act requires applicants to the FAA for drone licenses to submit a data collection statement. The statement must include who will operate the drone, where it will fly, what kind of data will be collected and how it will be used, whether it will be sold to third parties, and how long it will be retained for.

It requires law enforcement agencies to have a warrant or “extreme exigent circumstances” to use drone surveillance. It also requires law enforcement agencies, their contractors and subcontractors to include an additional statement on how they will minimize data collection and retention of data unrelated to investigation of a crime, biometricupdate.com reports. The FAA would also be required to create a website to list approved licenses, and the related data collection and minimization statements, as well as times and locations of drone flights, and data security breaches suffered by licensees.

The searchable information provided by the website would be required under the Act to disclose each drone’s technical capabilities, including facial recognition capabilities.

“Drones flying overhead could collect very sensitive and personally identifiable information about millions of Americans, but right now, we don’t have sufficient safeguards in place to protect our privacy,” said Senator Markey, a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

The FAA estimates that up to 2.7 million commercial unmanned aircraft will be sold each year in the U.S. by 2020.