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by baybal2 1883 days ago
Well, if it ridiculously easy to work around, they will probably get flak even earlier, harder, and be legislated to the ground more certainly than otherwise.

I spoke with Frank Wang on a few meetups in Shenzhen many years ago, back when DJI was still kind of a garage company.

Frank had big, nebulous ideas how he will be "engaging the civil society," "stakeholder negotiations," "industry wide self-governance body" blah blah blah to safeguard DJI from troubles.

I told him hiring lobbyists, and talking to officials, or even just making buzz about potential problems is a bad, bad idea.

Lawmakers can't ban things they don't know they can ban... unless you give them an idea.

Same thing with public reaction. People don't get outraged if they don't know why they should be.

In the end it came to that exact outcome, and drones are now in the process of being legislated to the ground, and effectively becoming unflyable by regular people without few kilograms of permits, and licenses.

He wanted to pride DJI on how government compliant, and safe his drones are, but instead just got them banned around every major city.

3 comments

I think in this case it's likely that Apple is drawing attention to the stalking concerns on purpose. Bring on the regulation and the public outrage! Just let it be directed at Tile for not doing this sooner.
> Bring on the regulation and the public outrage! Just let it be directed at Tile for not doing this sooner.

Public outrage seems to be based on a very low-res view of reality drawn from viral sound-bites, so I doubt that's how any public outrage would work.

Yeah, god forbids that a company may actually want to genuinely address an ethical problem, amirirte?
His customers got them banned by doing reckless things.
Really not.

Prior to the big buzz about drones, and DJI buying full page ads describing how their software can load no fly zones, avoid nuclear power stations, prisons, flight into people etc, nobody was ever concerned with some random Chinese gizmo.

And then he made people in places of power to read all kinds of scary things, to which they reacted in the most usual to them manner.

As a counter point, my flight was unable to land some years ago because some moron was flying his drone in the airport airspace.
Was it DJI drone?
Any examples?