bloomberg | 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 U.S. 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 U.S. drone market.
“If tomorrow DJI were completely banned,” the 21-year-old said, “I would be pretty frightened.”
Critics of DJI warn the dronemaker may be channeling 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 U.S. On Thursday, the Biden administration blocked American investment in the company, a year after President Donald Trump prohibited it from sourcing U.S. 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 U.S. 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 realizing 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 U.S.-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.
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