Maltese MP Calls For Drones To Catch People In Groups And Monitor Planning Permits
Nationalist MP Ivan Bartolo has urged Malta to introduce drones to help the police catch people congregating in public in groups of four or more.
“Police have so much to do and we mightn’t have enough enough police resources,” Bartolo said on Lovin Malta’s talk show #CovidCalls yesterday. “With drones, we could easily find out [what’s happening] all over Malta, you could easily map it and you could have a particular drone doing a particular route all the time, such as every ten, twenty or thirty minutes.”
“They would create pictures and send the feed into a particular office where 10, 15, 20 people would be sitting down in front of monitors and receive augmented reality showing what’s going on. If they see a place where people are concentrated, they can send police there.”
Moreover, he said such drones could be used beyond combating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as to monitor construction sites.
“There’s so many conditions imposed on development permits, and if you send a drone to take pictures on a daily basis, you’d be able to see the way the actual development project is changing. There’s a lot you can do with technology.”
Bartolo is a vocal advocate of using technology to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic and had recently called on Malta to develop a mobile app to assist the authorities in contact tracing and catching quarantine abusers.
Technology lawyer Deo Falzon said Bartolo’s proposal for a drone system could well be covered by data protection laws.
“They’ll basically be flying CCTVs, which are allowed by data protection law so long as certain safeguards are maintained. If we’re looking at some new ways of processing data, that processing is being justified on the overarching public interest to mitigate the pandemic.”
“Once that is over, that specific legal ground won’t be available to those people who are processing that data so they can’t keep doing what they’re doing legally.”
“Data protection laws aren’t there to stop particular technology but to ensure that the technology happens in a suitable framework, ie. one with the data subject’s rights at its core.”
Cover photo: Drone photo: Credit: Clément Bucco-Lechat
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