Luckily, as we’ve learned with license plates, there’s definitely no way to use a little observation and inference to turn a unique but otherwise uninformative number into a fairly robust ID; and databases that are designed to be easily accessible for routine use by Officer Donut are eminently secure and invariably feature robust access logs and serious discipline for misuse.
This is not to say that the idea that perhaps drones should have transponders just like a variety of other vehicles and vessels do is necessarily wrong; but DJI’s presentation of their proposal is transparently idiotic. Having an ‘electronic license plate’ that is totally not personally identifying except when Just And Proper Authorities need it to be is right up there with Comey’s Golden Key, that make cryptography only work against bad people.
If you add a transponder, the device becomes relatively easily identifiable(assuming it isn’t already; I’m not sure if the older RC aircraft control schemes have anything analogous; but the wifi-based cheapie drones don’t tend to be terribly coy about their MAC addresses), period. This may be desirable; but don’t play stupid little games with pretending that it’ll only be selectively identifiable for certain people under certain circumstances.
