send a team to my house and broke it… quite funny 
I see what you’re doing. This is like my approach, just in general being nicer to Siri and Alexa. Make sure that when the internet becomes self-aware, you are put on the “good” list.
Smart. 
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Am I going to be the only person who thinks this is a good idea? Drones aren’t going away, they are getting better, faster, and cheaper. So imagine the most reckless car driver you know, put a remote control in their hands, and remove the accountability factor. An electronic license plate would at least be a sane move towards regulation, which we need, instead of a “NO DRONES EVER FLY ZONES EVERYWHERE” policy that would descend without a mini-transponder.
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.
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I’ll just note (again) that under the current laws that the FAA is operating with, there are no drones: There are UAVs and there are model aircraft. (Fun: The same hardware can be either depending on how you use it.)
If you fly your DJI for commercial use, then it’s a UAV and there are regulations heavier than the drone.
If you fly it for pure hobby use, it’s a model aircraft with few regulations, and the FAA is forbidden to add more.
The current “you must register your drone” stuff, is cough operating in advance of the law, to put it politely. The registration page on their site specifically says that it’s for registering a UAV.
(I am not a lawyer, and good luck pointing out to local law enforcement that your DJI is a model aircraft rather than a UAV.)
Any further regulations over hobby drones are going to need a trip through the sausage factories of Congress.
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Is it though? Anecdotes of irresponsible drone use abound, but until more than .0000001% of unidentified drone incidents actually injure a person or property, I’d consider it to be a minuscule problem hardly worth a very broad and at-best-barely enforceable law. This is exactly the kind of law that will only cause a problem for the innocent, and erodes respect for the rule of law. We’re better off without it, just prosecute when someone is actually harmed.
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You could imagine them requiring something analogous to a SIM card in order to operate
You could imagine all you want. There is no way to enforce such a rule. Scroll up.
Even without physical harm, I hate it every time the quietude of nature is interrupted by that angry-swarm-of-bees sound
And how does your proposed idea or any of the proposed laws fix that, Gramps? They won’t force them to go away.
Which usually isn’t illegal, I’ll point out. You realize that you don’t own the air over your house or property (which has also been settled in court) beyond a very limited limit? You might get someone on a peeping tom charge but then again, you might not.
You keep talking sweet like that and I’ll expect a date.
What social norms? There are no social norms around drones, hence all of the confusion. Just because you’ve found “historic peace” there doesn’t mean your use is the only or dominant use. Do you get mad when people play with their barking dogs as well because they’re disturbing your historic peace?
As has also pointed out, there aren’t really any laws either. The FAA has no legally recognized (and tested in court) jurisdiction over model aircraft, which non-commercial drones happen to be.
But I don’t need to…
If it isn’t illegal, it is, by definition, legal (at least in the USA).
Also not legally enforceable. There are very specific limits to the rules or laws various muncipalities or private entities can set over airspace use, at least in the USA. It is a Federal matter. Local governments or private owners have zero say. The FAA regulates all air over property.
It seems that many drone operators feel entitled to do whatever the fuck they want without regard to others’ safety or privacy:
Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman
Drones disrupt efforts to fight California wildfire
Drone operator arrested for interfering with helicopter rescue mission
Drone spotted ‘few hundred feet’ from Southwest flight approaching Love Field Friday
FAA records detail hundreds of close calls between airplanes and drones
Rogue toy drones are interfering with military operations
If these problems cannot be addressed without regulation – social norms might help a bit, but you reject that – then regulation is coming, the only question is what form it will take.
What percentage of the total drones in use is that? There are tens of thousands (at minimum) drones out there in the hands of folks.
Don’t put words in my mouth that I didn’t say.
I said social norms don’t currently exist, which is the root of why we’re having this conversation. I never said that I reject social norms. Are we doing debate club here now?
The question wasn’t whether regulation was coming. It was how do they plan to enforce it? Is the FAA going to come to someone’s house and issue a ticket? My local cops quit arresting people for smoking weed openly a decade ago because they have better things to do with their time. Do you think they’ll come check on my drone license, even if a law passes?
Hmm. While municipalities can’t control drones flying over a park (at a reasonable height), I suspect they can stop people or fine them standing in the park while flying it.
I remember tethered control line glowplug model aircraft. Now those were annoying!
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It isn’t an “idea.” It is the current legal situation, well recognized, in fact.
The law doesn’t know how to deal with them. The FAA’s rules focus on commercial use. Hobbyist/home use, even under FAA rules, isn’t clear, nor is it clear that they can pass the regulations that they’ve tried to pass and have them stand up in court.
Offered because folks here might find this interesting:
It’s also not clear how far their rule-attempts go.
While “everyone knows” that they mean hobby drones have to be registered, they don’t define what they mean. The registration rule could also apply to anything in the air over 0.55 lbs: kites, all kinds of model aircraft including gliders, honking big paper airplanes, model rockets…
Vague rules are fine so long as they’re applied with common sense, but there’s always some a-hat in authority who will apply them the way they want to.
Are RAF bases run by the NSA OK?
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F550 almost complete. Was wiring up the MinimOSD and video with the AMP 2.8 today, along with telemetry & GPS
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Sounds good!
