What Do Our Drones See When They Fly? Nothing.

When a drone flies over your neighbourhood, it's fair to wonder: what does it see?

It's a reasonable question. Drones and cameras feel like they go together — the technology is associated with filming, with footage, with eyes in the sky. And in a world where surveillance has become quietly ambient — built into phones, doorbells, shop fronts, street corners — people are right to ask it of any new technology that enters their lives from above.
So we're going to answer it directly.

Our drones don't film while they fly. Not your town. Not your street. Not the kids playing outside or the cars parked in your driveway. There is no passive recording of the world beneath our flight paths. The airspace above your neighbourhood is not, for us, a source of data.

The only moment our low-resolution camera is active is right before a delivery lands — a single, low-resolution image captured to confirm the drop zone is clear and safe. No people in the way. No obstacles. That's the entire purpose. Once the delivery is complete, that image is gone. Not archived. Not analysed. Not passed to anyone. Gone.

That's the full picture: no video during flight, no photos stored, no facial recognition, no surveillance of any kind. Just a drone, a package, and a clean landing.

We made this decision deliberately, and we want to explain why — because "trust us" isn't good enough on its own.

Manna operates inside communities. Not above them, not adjacent to them — inside them. We fly over the same estates every day. The same back gardens, the same school runs, the same quiet cul-de-sacs. The people who live there aren't users or data points. They're neighbours. And we think the bar for earning a neighbour's trust is higher than the legal minimum.

The regulatory floor for drone operations doesn't require us to make these commitments. We make them because we think they're right, and because we think the kind of company you are is defined by the choices you make before anyone forces you to make them.

There's also a broader context worth naming. Drone delivery is a young industry. The norms and expectations around how operators behave — what data they collect, how long they keep it, what they do with it — are still being formed. We believe the companies operating now have a responsibility to set those norms well, not to extract as much as they can while the rules catch up.

We don't want to be part of a future where delivery infrastructure doubles as a surveillance network. That future would be bad for everyone, and it would be bad for trust in drone technology specifically. We'd rather help build the opposite: a world where drones in the sky mean your shopping is on the way, and nothing else.

So what does a Manna drone see when it flies over your neighbourhood? Nothing.
At the delivery spot, we do a quick low-res safety check to make sure it's safe to deliver. That's it.

No footage is stored. No images are shared. No data is collected about you, your property, or your neighbourhood beyond what's needed to deliver safely and leave.

That's the commitment. It's not in small print. It doesn't expire. And it doesn't come with exceptions carved out for "operational purposes" or "service improvement." It's just the way we work.

Privacy, delivered.