Remote ID is a digital license plate for drones. It is an FAA rule (14 CFR Part 89) that requires registered drones in US airspace to broadcast, during the entire flight:
- A unique identifier for the drone
- The drone's position, altitude, and velocity
- The location of the control station, which in practice means the pilot
- A timestamp and emergency status
The broadcast is unencrypted and goes out over standard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That design choice matters: the FAA built Remote ID to be publicly receivable. Anyone with a compatible receiver can see every compliant drone in range, in real time, along with where its pilot is standing.
Who has to comply
Almost everyone who flies seriously. Any drone that must be registered (over 250 grams, or any weight when flown commercially under Part 107) has to broadcast Remote ID, either built in or via an add-on module. The compliance deadline passed in 2023 and the FAA's enforcement discretion ended on March 16, 2024. Since then, flying without Remote ID where it's required is a violation that can bring fines and certificate action. Europe runs a parallel system, and the EU's 2026 Counter-Drone Action Plan pushes the mandate down to everything over 100 grams.
What this means for a facility
The interesting part for anyone running physical security: this data is free, legal to receive, and almost nobody collects it. Passively listening to Remote ID is lawful in the way reading license plates in your own parking lot is lawful. With a receiver on your roof you get a live picture of every compliant drone near your perimeter, a record of when it arrived and where it went, and the broadcast location of the person flying it.
Most facilities have no receiver at all, so the practical answer to "what flew over us last month?" is a shrug. That is the gap DroneID Monitor fills: a $50-class sensor plus software that turns the broadcasts into a live map, a 90-day audit log, and a geofence alert.
What Remote ID does not do
Honesty section. Remote ID does not stop, deter, or land anything; it is information, not mitigation. A deliberately hostile operator can switch it off, which is itself a federal violation, and catching that drone takes expensive RF or radar detection. What Remote ID gives you is complete coverage of the compliant and the careless, which is the overwhelming majority of real-world drone traffic: survey contractors, photographers, hobbyists, and the neighbor's kid. Visibility into that traffic is the cheapest security upgrade in the building, and it is sitting unclaimed in the air around your site right now.
Book a demo and we'll show you the live traffic over a real facility.