Today I was going through my flight records for my Anafi’s and Disco, and found something potentially very disturbing.
Earlier this year I bought an Anafi Extended Kit off 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 repairs. 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, including my two Anafi’s. 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.
Is it not simply a case of the flight records not having been wiped from the craft itself by the previous owner, and your app has simply pulled them down from the craft?
(and maybe then sync’d them back up to Parrot)
He says…
In a desperate bid to convince himself that Parrots system isn’t fundamentally flawed and in breach of 101 data protection and GDPR regs…
It is a possibility, @PingSpike, but I don’t think the Anafi has any onboard storage other than the removable SD card, and even though my eBay one came with a 16GB card I removed it prior to stripping the Anafi down and replaced it with my own 64GB. The Anafi itself doesn’t even store the small stuff like camera settings as these are stored in the APP.
Browsing the records it appears the previous owner came unstuck trying to use his mobile phone as the controller as every flight with this setup had a crash associated with it. The previous owner acquired the Anafi in Nov 2018, I acquired my first Anafi in Dec 2018 and the eBay one in May of this year.
As of today there hasn’t yet been any response from Parrot.
Yes it came with the Parrot supplied 16GB SD card but I didn’t use it. Instead I reformatted it and used it in a cheap action cam.
When I received this Anafi it was totally dead, (cue the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch). Once I’d repaired it I installed new FW updates prior to installing my own 64GB SD card.