Selfie drone manufacturer sued over allegations it misled customers

Lily Robotics, the defunct manufacturer of the world's first "selfie drone", is being sued over allegations that it faked product shots and misled consumers about the capability of its prototype devices. The lawsuit alleges that videos on Lily's website, presented as though they had been taken by the drone, were in fact shot by a mixture of GoPro cameras and DJI drones, a competitor model that costs up to four times as much and requires a skilled filmmaker to manually control the camera. The San Francisco District Attorney's (SFDA) office filed the case on Thursday, the day after Lily announced it was shutting down and refunding customers who had pre-ordered its drone at prices ranging from $499 to $899. Promotional videos detailed a number of groundbreaking capabilities of the Lily drone: the ability to take off from, and land on, a user's outstretched hand; a waterproof casing to enable water-based launches; and most impressively, autopilot mode that could allow the drone to follow the user at a set distance and automatically film them. In the videos, a drone operating under the autopilot setting was shown following people engaged in extreme sports such as snowboarding and white water kayaking.