Helping Ensure Ethical Indian Drone Operations

This blogpost was originally posted on the WeRobotics blog (link) on the 8th of October 2020

The global civilian drone industry is currently in a growth phase. From its initial beginnings in the mid-2000s as a hobbyist activity to its warranting regulatory supervision to its current status as a potential game-changer for national economies, the drone industry seems to have weathered it all. Even with the pandemic and associated lockdowns, the drone industry still has the potential to grow, providing as it does the option of ensuring that work gets done safely and hygienically. Over these years, the number of both drone users and the various applications of drone-acquired data have grown massively. 

“It’s possible for a project to comply with existing regulations and legislation, and even be commissioned by the state, and still be deficient from an ethical perspective.”

As with most emerging technologies, drones have influenced and exacerbated a plethora of complex social interactions. When drones are used without adequate consideration of their impact, they can inflict serious harm on individuals and communities. In India, policies, regulations, and social norms around drone use have not kept pace with the technological applications, especially around what constitutes safe and ethical drone use. At Technology for Wildlife, we are conservation geographers and drone pilots; thus, we are also participants in the Indian drone industry. We’ve come to realise that accepting certain work proposals would put us in ethically complicated and questionable situations that could potentially compromise our desire to do good. However, each time we choose to decline a project that does not fit with our values, we know there are enough other drone operators out there for the project to go ahead anyway. It’s possible for a project to comply with existing regulations and legislation, and even be commissioned by the state, and still be deficient from an ethical perspective. There is a clear need to create and implement guidelines for the drone industry regarding the ethical operation of drones to complement the government-mandated regulations.

In this context, in late 2019, we applied for the WeRobotics Unusual Solutions Competition, intending to understand what would be required to have participants in the nascent drone industry commit to conducting ethical operations. Today, we’re pleased to present our work in a report titled: Towards Incorporating Ethical Considerations into Indian Civilian Drone Operations. 

Rather than providing prescriptive rules on ethical operations, we’ve used our research and sectoral knowledge to put together a roadmap to what we believe ethical drone operations should look like in the Indian context, and how and why specific stakeholders should be engaged. This report is intended (to quote from it directly) for “anyone in, or engaging with, the drone industry and will be particularly relevant to those who intend to build solutions that would address the social implications of civilian drone use.” While we have focused on the Indian drone industry, it is quite likely that our work is also applicable to other countries with similar contexts.

We hope that in these troubled times, this report is one of the many pieces required to ensure that drone operations are empathetic, considerate, and ethical, both in India as well as globally.

Working on our Unusual Solution: The Ethics of Drone Use

For the last few months, we’ve been working on something very different from the other projects we’ve done so far. We are trying to put together a process for the creation of implementable, inclusive and contextualised ethical guidelines for the use of drones.

Like many new technologies, drones have come into use before the regulations for their use are in place. They have the potential to implement impactful and interesting work but are also capable of being gravely misused. While there are legal regulations in place for the use of drones in India, ethical safeguards have not been considered in these regulations. Drones have already begun to be used without consideration for consent or privacy. Their unethical use can greatly exacerbate existing power imbalances. In our own work, we often face ethical dilemmas when working on projects that involve the use of drones, or the data generated by them. However, considering that some estimates indicate that there are over 6,00,000 civilian drones in India, when we say no to a project, someone else will say yes. A longer-term solution is necessary.

We want to fill this gap. We are currently working on a solution through the Unusual Solvers Grant competition; we’re calling this project EDUCATE (Ethical Drone Use through Community Awareness and Tactical Engagement). Our Theory of Change targets major donors, investors and other funding agencies to convince them of the need to have an ethical framework for any project involving drones. We can use their buy-in as leverage to inculcate ethical frameworks in the various work flows of drone manufacture and use.

We intend to create engagement material to use at various levels of the drone industry that ensure that ethical considerations are incorporated in the processes of drone hardware and software manufacturing, as well as in the implementation of drone projects. This material will be aimed at facilitating an understanding of ethical frameworks, equipping teams with tools to draft best practice guidelines within their specific context. While we will create the process for drafting such a framework, the actual guidelines for implementation will be collaboratively drafted with the communities potentially impacted by the drone project.

To crystallize our Theory of Change, we have been undertaking three kinds of activities. Firstly, we spoke with members of a rural community who have been impacted by drone use. In their area, drones have been deployed without their consultation, and been used to create an atmosphere of fear. They did not feel legal recourse was a realistic option for them and they adapted their behaviour in response to drone deployment in the area. Their experiences helped us understand the ground level realities of the use of drones, validating the need for ethical frameworks. Secondly, we conducted interviews with relevant stakeholders and field experts. Through this process, we attempted to obtain insight into the workings of the drone industry, and made sense of the various points at which we could engage with it. Finally, we’ve conducted an extensive review of relevant literature to better understand the previous work done in this field.

( At the time of writing this blogpost, we were still in the process of conducting our field visits and our interviews. The rest of this post will focus on our review of the literature. -Editor)

Over the course of our literature review, some of the topics we’ve studied are:

• Ethical frameworks for other emergent technologies

• Uses and concerns of using drones in conservation and development projects

• Tools to gauge public perception, especially around new technologies

• Governance Theories around making ethical frameworks effective

• Post-normal Science

• Democratization of science

While the reading material has been varied and dense, this process has been extremely helpful for our project, and has also been personally gratifying.  Looking at the intersecting disciplines and theories that may be applicable to this project has been an exciting process for me.  While we are yet to create our engagement material itself, we have a sense of the shape of the process we wish to create. Many ethical frameworks for emergent technologies already exist. We do not want to create another one.  Instead, we would like to make existing frameworks more implementable by cohesively presenting them in formats that those implementing projects can use in their work.

As a theoretical backbone, we are using Technologies of Humility (Jasanoff, 2005) to help assess and manage emergent technologies with many unknowns. The framework outlined here for the ethical evaluation of new technologies highlights four pillars:

• Framing

• Vulnerability

• Distribution

• Learning

In addition to this, we are also imbibing her recommendation to make work more applicable by moving beyond academic peer review to include inputs from relevant stakeholders.

We’re certain that we want to incorporate reflexivity within the process we’re outlining; i.e. the creation of structured pathways to incorporate checks that allow for adaptation over the course of a project. This is especially important when working with emerging technologies such as drones, both for the community whose understanding and perception of the technology may shift as the project progresses, as well as for those implementing the project, giving them the flexibility required to make their project successful.

A large component of our work will also be to effectively engage communities in the process of drafting and overseeing the implementation of the drone projects they may be impacted by. As per our research, informed consent alone seems inadequate (Van de Poel, 2016) as a tool for making ethical guidelines inclusive. As part of our project, we will evaluate other methodologies of engagement, such as deliberative polling (Ahmad et. Al 2006). We will compare and contrast these, as well as various other methods and tools for community engagement and will be developing communication material accordingly.

Finally, we intend for accountability to be built into the framework and implementation of drone use. Testing the principles of the democratisation of science, we want to establish the pathways by which communities impacted by drones will be able to hold implementers and funders accountable for their actions and investments respectively. One example or possible manifestation of this could be contractual, where the project contract could include a clause stating that the power to renew the contract or permission to implement different phases of a project was with the impacted community.

We’ll be at the WeRobotics Unusual Solutions Pitch event in Nairobi, Kenya, next week where we’ll be competing with the other eight finalists for a grant to make our solution a reality! More on this once the event’s done; for more information, follow us on Twitter/Instagram or reach out to us via the contact form on our website.