Drones take centre stage in US-China war on data harvesting

In video reviews of the latest drone models to his 80,000 YouTube subscribers, Indiana college student Carson Miller doesn’t seem like an unwitting tool of Chinese spies.

Yet that’s how the US is increasingly viewing him and thousands of other Americans who purchase drones built by Shenzhen-based SZ DJI Technology Co, the world’s top producer of unmanned aerial vehicles. Miller, who bought his first DJI model in 2016 for $500 and now owns six of them, shows why the company controls more than half of the US drone market. 

“If tomorrow DJI were completely banned,” the 21-year-old said, “I would be pretty frightened.” 

Critics of DJI warn the drone maker may be channelling reams of sensitive data to Chinese intelligence agencies on everything from critical infrastructure like bridges and dams to personal information such as heart rates and facial recognition. But to Miller, consumers face plenty of bigger threats to the privacy of their data. “There are apps that track you on your smartphone 24/7,” he said.

That attitude is a problem for American officials who are seeking to end DJI’s dominance in the US. Earlier this week, the Biden administration blocked American investment in the company, a year after President Donald Trump prohibited it from sourcing US parts. Now, lawmakers from both parties are weighing a bill that would ban federal purchases of DJI drones, while a member of the Federal Communications Commission wants its products taken off the market in the US altogether. 

In many ways, DJI has become the poster child of a much wider national security threat: The Chinese government’s ability to obtain sensitive data on millions of Americans. In recent weeks, former top officials in both the Obama and Trump administrations have warned that Beijing could be scooping up personal information on the citizens of rival nations, while walling off data on China’s 1.4 billion people. 

“Each new piece of information, by itself, is relatively unimportant,” Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School who served in the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, wrote in Foreign Affairs, referring to surveillance and monitoring technologies. “But combined, the pieces can give foreign adversaries unprecedented insight into the personal lives of most Americans.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been far ahead of the West in realising the importance of data in gaining both an economic and military advantage, according to Matt Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump Administration. “If Washington and its allies don’t organize a strong response, Mr Xi will succeed in commanding the heights of future global power,” he wrote in a co-authored New York Times op-ed last month.  

The data battle strikes at the heart of the US-China strategic competition, and has the potential to reshape the world economy over the coming decades — particularly as everything from cars to yoga mats to toilets are now transmitting data. Harnessing that information is both key to dominating technologies like artificial intelligence that will drive the modern economy, and crucial for exploiting weaknesses in strategic foes. 

Concerns related to data security “will be a defining issue for the next decade” as technological advances lead to “explosive demand” for ever more bits of information, according to Paul Triolo, a former US government official who specialises in global technology policy at risk consultancy Eurasia Group. The result, he added, is likely an almost complete bifurcation of the internet, reflecting the values of competing political systems. 

“The democratic and authoritarian digital worlds will be built on largely different hardware, with different standards, and limited points of connection,” Triolo said. “This will drive up costs for businesses operating across these two spheres, reduce innovation, and lead to geopolitical tensions, reduced trade, and a much more complex world for companies to operate within. Other countries will be forced to choose sides in this divide, and this will be painful and costly.”

Already, data security concerns are starting to balkanise manufacturing supply chains and financial markets amid fears that governments will weaponize information gleaned from smartphone apps, medical devices and consumer products like drones. Policy makers in both the US and China are rushing to implement more measures to protect their citizens’ data.  

Beijing has acted more swiftly, passing laws  aimed at preventing user data from seeping into the wrong hands while strengthening the government’s ability to control information held by private firms, part of a wider crackdown on its biggest tech companies.