01 Who we are & what this covers
The Pilot Drone, Inc. (“The Pilot Drone,” “we,” “us”) operates a marketplace that connects people who want to learn to fly drones with FAA-certified instructors, and supports booking, payment, drone rental, and Certificates of Completion.
This policy applies to our website, our mobile apps, and the services we provide through them. It covers both students who book training and instructors who teach on the platform. Where a section applies to only one of those groups, we say so.
Your instructor is an independent professional, not our employee. They receive some of your information in order to teach you, and they are responsible for how they use it. See our Terms of Service for how that relationship works.
02 Information we collect
We collect information you give us, information generated when you use the platform, and a small amount of information from third parties who help us run it.
Information you give us
Information generated when you use the platform
- Training records — completed sessions, tracked flight hours, milestones, and Certificates of Completion.
- Transaction history — past bookings, invoices, receipts, rentals, cancellations, and refunds.
- Device and usage data — IP address, browser and device type, operating system, pages viewed, and timestamps. Used for security, debugging, and understanding what people use.
- Location data — the location of a field session, so we can give you map directions and check local flight conditions. If you allow precise location on your mobile device, we use it to show nearby instructors and field sites; you can turn this off in your device settings at any time.
Information from third parties
- Stripe — payment confirmations and payout status.
- Weather services — forecast and conditions for the time and place of a scheduled field session, so a session can be marked “weather delayed” and you can be notified.
- Identity and certificate verification providers — confirmation of an instructor’s credentials.
03 How we use your information
We use the information above to:
- Create and maintain your account, and authenticate you when you sign in.
- Match you with instructors, show live availability, and take bookings.
- Verify that instructors hold a valid FAA Part 107 certificate before they teach.
- Process payments, drone rental fees, refunds, and instructor payouts.
- Give your instructor what they need to run the session, and give you what you need to attend it — directions to the field site, or a link to the online class.
- Send you booking approvals, reassignments, reminders, and weather-related cancellations.
- Track your training progress and issue your Certificate of Completion.
- Keep sessions safe and the platform trustworthy: preventing fraud, investigating misuse, and enforcing our Terms.
- Improve the platform, understand which courses and features people use, and fix problems.
- Comply with legal obligations, including tax and accounting requirements.
We rely on the following legal bases where applicable: performing our contract with you (bookings, payments, training), our legitimate interests (security, fraud prevention, improving the service), your consent (marketing email, precise location), and compliance with law.
05 Payments
Payments and drone rental charges are processed by Stripe, a third-party payment processor. When you check out, your card or mobile wallet details go directly to Stripe over an encrypted connection. We never receive or store your full card number.
We receive a record of the transaction — the amount, the date, whether it succeeded, and limited identifying details such as the card brand and last four digits — which we use for receipts, refunds, disputes, and our own accounting.
Stripe handles your payment information under its own privacy policy, which we encourage you to read at stripe.com/privacy. Instructors who receive payouts also provide Stripe with tax and bank account details directly.
06 Notifications & communications
We send two kinds of messages:
- Service messages — booking confirmations and approvals, instructor reassignments, session reminders, weather-related delays and cancellations, receipts, and account security alerts. These are part of the service and you cannot opt out of them while you have an active booking or account, though you can turn off push notifications in your device settings and still receive them by email.
- Marketing messages — news about new courses and features. You can opt out at any time using the unsubscribe link in any such email, or in your account settings. Opting out of marketing does not stop service messages.
08 How long we keep data
We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy, and then delete or de-identify it.
- Account information — for as long as your account is open. If you delete your account, we delete or de-identify your profile, subject to the exceptions below.
- Booking and payment records — retained for at least seven years, because tax, accounting, and financial-dispute rules require it.
- Training records and certificates — retained while your account is open so you can prove your training history and re-download your certificate. You can ask us to delete them.
- Instructor verification documents — retained for as long as you teach on the platform and for a reasonable period afterwards, so we can show that a certificate was verified at the time a session took place.
- Safety and incident records — retained as long as necessary to resolve the matter and meet any legal obligation.
09 Security
We protect your information with encryption in transit (TLS), encryption of sensitive data at rest, access controls that limit which of our staff can see what, and regular review of our systems. Payment card data is handled by Stripe, a PCI-DSS Level 1 certified provider, and never touches our servers.
No system is perfectly secure. You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for telling us promptly at hello@thepilotdrone.com if you believe your account has been compromised.
10 Your rights & choices
Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights over your personal information:
- Access — ask what personal information we hold about you and get a copy of it.
- Correction — fix information that is inaccurate or incomplete. You can edit most of it yourself in your account settings.
- Deletion — ask us to delete your account and personal information. We may need to keep certain records (see How long we keep data).
- Portability — receive your information in a portable, machine-readable format.
- Objection and restriction — object to, or ask us to limit, certain processing.
- Withdraw consent — where we rely on your consent, withdraw it at any time. This does not affect processing that already happened.
- Non-discrimination — we will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or give you a lower quality of service for exercising any of these rights.
To exercise any of these rights, email hello@thepilotdrone.com. We will verify your identity before acting, and respond within the time the law allows — generally 45 days in California and 30 days in the UK and EU. You may also authorise an agent to make a request on your behalf.
If you are in the UK or EU and you are not satisfied with how we handle your request, you have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
11 Children & minors
The Pilot Drone is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, email hello@thepilotdrone.com and we will delete it.
Students aged 13 to 17 may use the platform only with the consent and involvement of a parent or legal guardian, who must create the booking and accept our Terms on their behalf. The FAA requires you to be at least 16 to hold a Part 107 remote pilot certificate.
12 International users
We are based in the United States, and the information we collect is stored and processed in the United States and in other countries where our service providers operate. Data protection law in those countries may differ from the law where you live.
Where we transfer personal information out of the UK or the European Economic Area, we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, to protect it. Contact us if you would like more detail about those safeguards.
13 Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the platform changes or the law does. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page.
If a change materially affects your rights — for example, if we start using your information for a genuinely new purpose — we will give you prominent notice, by email or in the app, before it takes effect.
14 Contact us
Questions about this policy, or about the information we hold on you: