San Francisco’s Committee on Information Technology last month quietly reviewed a new policy that seeks to relax restrictions on the city’s growing drone fleet. The proposed guidance would reduce limitations on where drones can fly, boost data storage and expand information sharing. It also removes a requirement that departments alert the public of drone operations 24 hours in advance.
Some are excited about the deregulatory direction of the new policy, hoping that it can pave the way for developments like drone package deliveries by Amazon. Others warn it represents “anti-privacy practice.”
City departments using drones — the controller’s office, fire department, public utilities, port, public works, recreation and parks, and technology — must have a policy approved by the Board of Supervisors, according to the city’s administrative code.
Citywide drone policies reviewed and approved by the Committee on Information Technology essentially serve as baseline requirements for all department-specific drone policies. The police department’s drone usage is governed differently, due to the adoption of Proposition E by San Francisco voters in 2024. If the committee approves a new citywide policy, departments will have the opportunity to rewrite drone policies for approval by the Board of Supervisors.
San Francisco’s current policy, in place since 2019, requires that departments using drones minimize data storage and erase personal identifying information from whatever video they capture. Departments are encouraged to live-stream when using drones to avoid saving footage on a computer or in cloud storage. When data must be stored, it should be deleted after one year, unless there are special circumstances, according to current guidelines.
The new policy would change that. Viviana Padelli, AI policy principal at the Department of Technology, said that drone data should be treated “as a city asset,” possibly signaling a pro-surveillance attitude shift from the current policy.
Other experts say that retaining data is unnecessary and an invasion of privacy.
“You know right away that that video is going to be used in a criminal investigation, you know it immediately,” said Brian Hofer, executive director of privacy advocacy group Secure Justice. Offering a comparison, Hofer said that Oakland’s drone policy is the “gold standard” for privacy and only allows drone footage to be retained for five days.
The proposal also alters key language about protecting personal identifying information. Where the original policy says departments “must remove” personal identifying information from drone data, the new policy simply encourages departments to “minimize” their retention and use.
Mariam Abdel-Malek, a member of the Committee on Information Technology who does not otherwise work for the city, asked Padelli whether the department would make sure personal identifying information was scrubbed from stored drone footage.
Padelli said eliminating such information from city data was required “whenever possible, as soon as possible,” but that departments may not always be able to do so.
Other major concerns among privacy advocates are the possibility for data breaches and the sharing of drone data with the federal government.
“It is very, very difficult, once that data is captured, to keep it from getting leaked to places that it shouldn’t be,” said Hillary Ronen, a former San Francisco supervisor and incoming director of La Raza Centro Legal, noting that San Francisco and Oakland both illegally shared license plate data with ICE in 2025.
The purpose of retaining so much drone data is to improve public safety and emergency response capacity, according to the proposal. The new policy removes bans on information sharing among city departments and explicitly allows sharing with external entities for public safety missions.
While the proposed policy poses significant changes to the 2019 measure, neither approach has a clear enforcement mechanism.
“Mandatory language in local surveillance policies is only as good as its enforcement.” said Melissa Hernandez, who worked to develop the police department’s drone policy when she was a legislative aide in former Supervisor Dean Preston’s office, adding that softened language in the new policy “might be a way for the city to protect itself from litigation.”
The committee plans to review the proposed policy changes and consider final approval in the next few months.
