Congressman Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, today released a draft of a bill that would place limits on the types and volume of data that government agencies could collect using unmanned aircraft. The bill would also require the FAA to take citizens' privacy into consideration when licensing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, making operators disclose the type of data that the aircraft would collect and the data's intended use.

The FAA is required by legislation to have rules in place for the certification and licensing of domestic UAVs by September, and the first "fast-tracked" drones for use by law enforcement and first responders are already being fielded. By the FAA's estimation, there could be over 30,000 unmanned aircraft in use in the United States by 2020. But there have been significant concerns voiced over the safety of drones and the potential threat to privacy. A House Homeland Security subcommittee heard testimony late last month on the threat posed by drones to citizens' civil rights, and how some drones currently deployed by some law enforcement agencies could be fooled by GPS jammers to be flown off course or crashed.

Markey's bill would seek to require civilian agencies operating drones, such as state and local law enforcement, to have "data-minimization" plans to limit the privacy impact of their unmanned aircraft operations. And the bill would place strict controls on the commercial use of UAV-collected imagery and other data. In a statement, Markey said, "Drones are already flying in US airspace—with thousands more to come—but with no privacy protections or transparency measures in place... and just because a company soon will be able to register a drone license shouldn’t mean that company can turn it into a cash register by selling consumer information."