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DJI official defends company’s data security policies
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DroneLife: There’s been quite a lot of talk within the U.S. about banning drones from China and quite a lot of interest in whether or not these drones present any sort of security risk. Obviously, DJI has said that’s not the case. Are you able to walk me through what steps you’ve taken to be sure that the info that’s collected by drones within the U.S. doesn’t wind up some other place?
Welsh: Possibly first is a few background. We were founded in about 2006, and we were the primary to launch a consumer off-the-shelf drone. So, the complete product, right? Airframe, gimbal to stabilize the camera and a camera system.
What had happened was a variety of U. S. soldiers were buying these products off the shelf. We weren’t selling on to the military, but they were getting utilized in military applications.
The Pentagon put out a memo that specifically named DJI and said this practice has to stop and desist. We complained they usually modified the memo to say the soldiers shouldn’t buy consumer off-the-shelf drone products and take into theater. However the reputational damage has sort of been set at that time.
And so, we began to do loads on data security. One in every of the primary things we did was we made sure that we only take data for those who opt in to share it.
On a consumer product, you’ve got the choice to do each flight logs and videos. Videos would go to SkyPixel, which is largely our social media platform. We don’t take it robotically; you’ve got to opt in to try this.
On our enterprise products, we don’t offer SkyPixel. So, the one thing you may do is opt in to share your flight logs. And again, you’ve got to opt in to do it.
The second thing we put in place is: for those who do determine to share that data with us it’s all hosted on servers in the USA. So, for those who’re flying outside of China, anywhere on this planet outside China, your data is hosted in the USA.
The third thing that we did was we created something called local data mode. It principally permits you to fly a DJI drone with no connection to the web. So, it’s like having an air-gapped computer that never connects to the web or a Wi Fi system.
In case you’re flying a really sensitive mission, you may fly in local data mode. Since then, we’ve actually expanded local data mode to mean which you could do offline firmware updates. So, you may take the firmware and cargo it as much as a pc.
You might buy a DJI drone, unbox it, do one firmware update, go into local data mode, and never come out of local data mode.
DroneLife: Why do you think that there continues to be this notion that DJI drones are security risks? Why do you think that this has kept on and it’s led to all this laws?
Welsh: DJI was a primary mover, and as a primary mover we became very big very fast. We’re an enormous percentage of the market, and our domestic competitors within the U.S. struggle to compete with us on quality and price. And so, they lobby very hard to have us banned on the federal and the state level. This isn’t something that comes out of nowhere.
And you then add within the really toxic relationship between China and the US and it’s just a really receptive audience, right? I mean, there’s almost no element of technology you may take a look at without delay, if it has a Chinese angle to it that individuals are questioning it.
DroneLife: You mentioned about your competitors having lobbyists. DJI also has its own lobbyists. How would you compare your lobbying efforts to those American drone corporations?
Welsh: I wish we had the interior resources that our competitors had. The issue is that we face quite a broad array of competitors. In case you add up all their headcount, they’ve much more people on the market advocating. We’ve got a really small team in Washington, D.C.
And our lobbying expenditure, for those who compared it to every other company within the technology sector, is way below par. So, we’re not spending anywhere near enough, frankly, but we’re doing our greatest.
DroneLife: Keeping on the lobbying piece for just one other minute, do you lobby on the state level?
Welsh: We’ve got begun to do that as well. The entire strategy behind our lobbying is admittedly just to reply and inject facts into the storyline.
There’s quite a lot of misinformation that’s spread about DJI by our competitors and others. And so, our lobbyists literally just go in and share all their reports, our cyber data security and other information, and simply to try to put some facts on the table.
We’ve been doing that federally for several years, and since we’ve seen the rise of state efforts to ban our products, we’ve been beginning to do that at a state level as well.
I would love to perhaps give real kudos to our partners. We’ve got a variety of really enthusiastic end-users. Plenty of them are asking us to do increasingly more to try to protect our place available in the market. And so, we’ve a variety of partners that we’ve brought together and formed the Drone Advocacy Alliance.
It’s principally a platform that brings together software corporations that write software for the drone industry, training organizations, drone service providers, an entire host of others, to try and truly make their voice heard.
DroneLife: DJI had launched a series of products that were speculated to be designed specifically for U.S. security use, and apparently that didn’t go over too big. Are you able to explain what happened with that?
Welsh: When these issues first arose, we created something that we call a Government Edition. It was meant to be for secure users, government agencies that wanted the next level of security. This was 4 years ago now.
The Department of Interior tested it. That they had NASA and others are available. It was approved to be used.
Not many individuals actually bought the product … since it was a bit of bit dearer. It added certain layers of security; it allowed you to do all offline firmware updates, to maintain the product offline permanently.
We realized, ‘Look, people aren’t going to pay a premium for this,’ so we should always just make this standard across all of our enterprise products. And so now, for those who buy a current enterprise drone, it has the features that you just had on the Government Edition.
DroneLife. It’s been suggested that DJI might give you the chance to get around a few of these restrictions by manufacturing drones within the U.S. Are you able to discuss why you’re not doing that?
Welsh: Actually, we were very keen on doing this and explored it quite publicly, 4 to 5 years ago. Truthfully, the prices associated are a part of it, but in addition, we didn’t really think we were going to get the complete profit.
The character of the attempts to ban Chinese drones are that for those who take a look at quite a lot of the efforts, it’s ‘no Chinese parts, no Chinese software.’ So, we’d have to actually produce a rather more expensive drone.
Frankly, for those who use an iPhone, it’s using Chinese parts, and it’s manufactured in China. There’s quite a lot of sensitive traffic that goes over people’s iPhones. So, I believe that’s an actual problem with this effort. We could be very inquisitive about exploring it again, if there was an inexpensive dialogue.