(Newswire.net — June 17, 2019) — The recent rescue of a deaf child that felt in a hole in Fremont California was possible thanks to a drone equipped with a thermal vision camera that detected the child’s heat signature.
This ‘eye in the sky ‘technology which provided crucial information to the rescue teams was created by Chinese tech giant DJI.
Drones are a part of the daily activities of police and firefighters and it is no secret that the best drones are made in China. The U.S. Government, however, recently issued a warning that Chinese-made drones may be secretly sharing data with China.
According to CNN, which broke the news, the DHS report does not single out specific vendors; however, it is a common fact that almost all drones in service of the US police, firefighters and other rescue units are manufactured by DJI, a company from the Chinese province of Shenzhen.
Disputing the claims by DHS, Chinese DJI has introduced secure data transfer protocols in their products and even created an offline flight mode. The DHS, however, calls on the fact that DJI is obligated to share their Intel with Chinese government.
It is not the first time the U.S. government raised a security issue warning on Chinese technology. In 2017, the US Army issued a ban on the use of DJI drones, alleging in a memo that the company is sharing critical data with the Chinese government.
Also that year, an internal report from an intelligence division of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency in Los Angeles assessed that DJI was “selectively targeting government and privately owned entities [within the U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement sectors] to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive US data.”
Around a thousand U.S. public security units use drones and almost all of them are produced by the DJI. A Fremont firefighting brigade officer told the Voice of America that they have an internal data security system that DJI provided with features such as the offline flight mode.
“We are not in the business of controlling the data,” the DJI representative Romeo Dursher told VoA. He added that the system is set up so the user completely controls the data.