There ARE ways to resolve this. The drone itself is just a random collection of components that gather data. It’s the data that people are concerned with, and THAT is where they should be focussing. If the concern is that the data could be used in some other ways, require that all of the data be hosted at a partner within the United States. The drones themselves don’t have the ability to transmit data overseas, they can only downlink data. So you need to simply validate that no drone operating in the US can deliver its data to anything other than its downlink (through encryption or other) and then put some regulations around those endpoints.

Its not rocket science. The IT industry does endpoint protection ALL THE TIME. If you want to secure the data – secure the DATA. This is smaller variant of the TikTok concern, and quite honestly something that should be done far broader than TikTok and DJI. If you want to secure American data – regulate how that should be done like many other countries already do with GDPR and similar. You can make sure that data collected by ANY company that’s supposed to remain in the US – STAYS in the US.