PRIO's Kristin Bergtora Sandvik provided comments on the use of civilian drones in Africa in a Voice of America story from 20 December 2013. She warns that while drones may resolve some issues, they will raise others.
"Across Africa, very few countries have comprehensive domestic legislation on privacy and data protection and information storage….A drone cannot only see or listen. It can also sense and hear and read for example so in a couple of years time when you have the smaller drones also outfitted with facial recognition technology. For example, you could have smaller drones that could potentially hack into wireless systems," said Sandvik.
Read the article on Voice of America's website.
Sandvik is a senior researcher at PRIO, and leads the project Regulating Cyberwar: Understanding Challenges to Norwegian Security and International Law. She also serves at the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies, which is a joint CMI, NUPI and PRIO initiative that aims to promote and facilitate critical and relevant research on key humanitarian issues. The centre serves as a hub for research and policy discussion, and features a national network of scholars working on humanitarian issues from outside the three core institutions. It also features an extensive network of international humanitarian scholars.
