On May 18, the Council of State ordered the stop of the use of drones by the Prefecture of Police to monitor the crowd. Explanations.
- The Paris police headquarters had been using drones since March to monitor compliance with social distancing measures
- The Council of State has prohibited this use to preserve respect for privacy
Drones on the ground. On May 18, the Council of State ordered the Paris Police Prefecture to suspend its use of drones to monitor public space in the context of Covid-19. The argument of the police officers to observe the “general physiognomy of the affluence on the Parisian territory to detect (…) the gatherings of public contrary to the restrictive measures in force“was not enough to convince the highest administrative judicial body. In the name of the invasion of respect for private life and the non-respect of the rules of protection of personal data, it orders the Prefecture of Police to cease this activity and destroy all images captured in this context.
A victory for the associations La Quadrature du Net and the League of Human Rights at the origin of this appeal.This is a historic victory against drone surveillanceensures the Quadrature of the net. According to the Council of State, this illegality can only be corrected by a ministerial order issued after consultation with the CNIL. Pending such an order, (…) the police will have to ground the vast majority of their drones across the country” she believes.
Law void
Since March 18, the Prefecture of Police has been using one of its drones daily to transmit live images of certain targeted sites to the Information and Command Center of the prefecture. From the offices, an operator gave instructions depending on the circumstances to the drone pilots on site in order to move the device or use an integrated loudspeaker. However, in the eyes of the Council of State, nothing guarantees a possible diversion of this flying eye. “[Ces drones] are equipped with an optical zoom and can fly at a distance less than that fixed by the note of May 14, 2020 are likely to collect identifying dataexplains the order. [Ils] do not include any technical device likely to avoid, in any case, that the information collected can lead, for the benefit of a use other than that currently practiced, to make the persons to whom they relate identifiable.“
However, the Council of State also underlines the absence of a regulatory text which would authorize the creation and regulate the methods of use of this data by drones. “Unlike video surveillance, whose devices must comply with certain constraints (location and orientation of cameras, settings prohibiting the capture of images relating to building entrances, inside buildings and private spaces, etc.), images filmed by drones necessarily capture images relating to these protected areas, thus infringing the fundamental freedoms of the right to privacy and the right to the protection of personal data“abounds for its part the League of Human Rights.
Controls in other cities
This decision does not sign the prohibition of the drone as a surveillance tool by law enforcement. In its ordinance, the Council of State explains that it is necessary either to build regulations around the collection of data by drones in consultation with the Cnil (National Commission for Computing and Liberties), or to curb drones with “technical devices likely to make it impossible, whatever their intended uses, to identify the people filmed.“
For its part, the independent authority, the Cnil, claims to have sent the first requests for information, from April 23, on the use of these drones by the police during confinement and at the present time. She claims to havecarried out checks with the Ministry of the Interior concerning the use of drones in several cities. These checks target national police and gendarmerie services. Similar checks are carried out in several municipalities whose municipal police have also, it seems, used drones.“
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