Data Protection Issues.

[Nidge]

Today I was going through my flight records and found something potentially very disturbing.

Earlier this year I bought an Anafi Extended Kit of eBay. The seller was not the original owner but rather someone who’d purchased a pallet of Amazon Returns and was selling this Anafi Kit as spares and/or returns. After receiving the Anafi I found it was a simple repair and I’ve been flying it ever since.

Now, I also own a Parrot Disco that uses a different FreeFlight App but it also displays the flight records of all Parrot devices owned. What I was surprised to see is that in the FreeFlight Pro App for the Disco it claims I’ve had four crashes (I’ve never crashed a drone in eight years of flying) but on top of that it shows the flights and crashes (6 flights four of which ended in a crash) made by the previous owner of the eBay Anafi along with their home location.

This shows that the flight data we submit to Parrot is not associated with our accounts but with the serial number of the drone, and this data is passed on when we sell our Parrot Drones.

Regards

Nidge.

 

[Jagerbomb52]

Good to know, thanks for bringing this up. I know you can delete flights but is it actually getting deleted on the server or just from our App?

 

[Liger 1956]

You need to email, to have it in writing, Parrot and advise them of what you have found. If you are in the EU then the requirements of the GDPR apply. If you are in the UK I would also report it to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) or the equivalent in the country in which you reside as it would appear to be a very serious offence.

As a thought did the seller not clear the SD card in the Anafi and the previous owners flights were loaded from the SD card to your account when you connected to the controller with your phone?

 

[Nidge]

You need to email, to have it in writing, Parrot and advise them of what you have found. If you are in the EU then the requirements of the GDPR apply. If you are in the UK I would also report it to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) or the equivalent in the country in which you reside as it would appear to be a very serious offence.

As a thought did the seller not clear the SD card in the Anafi and the previous owners flights were loaded from the SD card to your account when you connected to the controller with your phone?

I emailed Parrot before posting on here and received the automated thank you and 48 hour wait time for a reply. The SD card supplied was blank but I also formatted it before it’s use.

Obviously if/when I receive a reply from Parrot I’ll post it here.

Regards

Nidge.

 

[Liger 1956]

You could try emailing the address in section 13 of their privacy policy as you should get a faster responce.

Parrot - Official website privacy policy www.parrot.com

Official website privacy policy of www.parrot.com

www.parrot.com

 

[Joe_Scot]

This is certainly interesting, and thanks for reporting it. Will be interesting to see the response from Parrot.

Having done some troubleshooting during the year on why some of my flights didn't show up in the app (a bug which seemed to be fixed when I updated to FF6 v6.6.0 and all of a sudden the 24 missing flights appeared in the app) I came to the conclusion that nothing useful was being retained on the SD card for long. I had reformatted and re-used the SD card several times since the missing flights and yet they were all retained somewhere (guessing maybe in the SC3, or possibly in the drone which I assume has some internal memory ???)

In fact since FF6 v6.6.0 it seems the log.bin files are rotated even more quickly than in the past. I have a 128GB SD card which I have used since the start. Reformatted it again on Sunday and used it for 8 flights since then. Still plenty of free space and yet the log.bin files are already being overwritten from the first couple of flights with the later flights.

So, I am going to follow this up with Parrot in the light of the data protection issue to try find out where flight data is being saved. If you had a faulty drone that got returned to Parrot, this could I imagine get refurbished and sold on in the future, and your data could be in the SC3 or the drone.

 

[Nidge]

The logs are stored in the Parrot “Cloud” and I believe are linked to the serial number of the Anafi and/or controller.

I installed the latest version of the FF6 app onto a new factory fresh Android Tablet yesterday and all the records from the previous owners flights appeared on there also. I haven’t connected either of my Anafi’s to this tablet as I’m returning it back to Amazon as it’s not spec’d as Amazon had listed it.

Just to clarify I bought this second Anafi as spares or repairs and when it arrived it was totally dead. I formatted the supplied SD card and used it in a cheap Action Camera prior to carrying out the repairs. Once the repairs were done I installed my own 64GB SD card.

If I don’t here anything from Parrot in the next few days I’ll ask the question again on their Twitter page. From experience companies tend to respond quite quickly if a problematic post appears on their page. ?

Regards

Nidge.