A very good point that embarrassingly highlights my lack of knowledge about it. Thank you for the correction.
I suppose a decent, easy system for evading its tracking would just be for rich people to swap keys to their private jets. Or chartering. Or flying commercial. Etc.
There is reasonable argument that it is not much difference between tracking someone car and tracking someone private jet. But super-rich are outgroup so most people who would strongly oppose the first case would not care in the second case.
The fact that there is flight data system is not much relevant, it could be modified to anonymize data.
And I just pointed out to you that the movement of private planes is already far more public than the movement of private cars, and for good reasons. The account isn't (as far as I know, I've never looked at it) actually doing their own tracking; they are simply (I assume) collating public information from air traffic control authorities, etc.
FWIW, this is the one good thing about loss of privacy and people actually tracking private jet movements of the really wealthy that those are a little bit harder to hide. Not impossible. Just harder.
> Which would make the identifier itself, and its real-time location, public information, but the knowledge of who owns the identifier would remain as private information.
Yes and no. Tracking airplanes is something hobbyists have been doing for decades; there are people who hang out by airports and record every flight in and out. The PIA program can be useful for realtime masking but the information is far from secret — nor should it be, imo.
> "Elon Musk, for example, has a Gulfstream and there's only so many people that fly that particular plane out of Brownsville, Texas and fly to the same airports," Sweeney told Insider.
> ...
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
Well, rich and poor people are equally subject to tracking when they travel in their private jets. That seems fair. They can use untracked modes of travel like public transit or cars.
We're okay with tracking planes. It's unclear why this should change when it's privately owned by an individual instead of by an airline.
There are actually plenty of reasons we might want to treat air traffic different, regardless of who's on board or who owns the plane. Whether it's because planes are significantly less private by nature of being very noisy and visible (i.e. there's less of an expectation of privacy because you're being very public), or because they're a greater risk to everyone because they're in the air and full of fuel (i.e. you have a legitimate interest to know whether one might fly near you).
> would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets
Why? They are using our airspace. Looking down in to our backyards. I have a right to at least get an identifier I can use to report to authorities.
I've worked with VVIP executive protection teams before and if the trip needs to be secret they will schedule plane swaps along the trip or rent a jet that is not attributable to the company.
Some activists were using this kind of service to track dictator's flights to track stolen money [1]. If said dictator's can block their aircraft, the misappropriated funds would be easier to sneak out of the country.
The necessity of private jets is beside the point.
At issue is whether or not tracking private travel should be accessible to everyone with an internet connection.
Most people would not be ok with tracking private vehicles, and it’s unclear why this should change when the mode of transportation is a plane instead of a car.
Look carefully, especially if you live near an Alpha or Beta level global city NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, DC, Miami in the United States. FlightAware took out the wealthy's private planes from their database at their request. There's lodes of exceptions to tracking if you are monied.
What we need is more people running things like RTL-SDRs to acquire data the rich and powerful want hidden to avoid exposure for shady activities.
Lol. Take a step back and remember that some planes are privately owned.
And now imagine a website called numberplateradar24.com that aggregates the feeds from 1000s of number plates scanners around the country. Which means you can track an individuals car.... does this sound like an invasion of privacy. Where's the dividing line? I think it's totally reasonable that private planes are allowed to encrypt their identities. As long as their position is still trackable it doesn't matter if the general public don't know everything.
Yes; I know. But similar to tracking a wireless client by MAC address, it could be possible to enhance the system to assign single-use identifiers to flight plans such that it would be radically more difficult to casually associate tracking data to specific aircraft in realtime. I'm not advocating for any change necessarily; just pointing out that RF emissions of a modern aircraft do nothing to belie its identity. The registration information itself is irrelevant to tracking the aircraft movements.
If I own a plane and you track that plane, there's nothing I can do, since that information is public. Websites that publish that data through an API are publishing data they got from the aircraft itself.
There's a number of ways one can avoid being tracked and Elon saying there aren't is a blatant lie.
Governments have developed so much surveillance technology that they can easily invade the privacy of many citizens, yet tracking the exact whereabouts of planes flying in the sky - something that for scheduled, commercial flights whose routes should very much be publicly known information - still seems out of reach? I find that fact a little unsettling.
I think there's a hard public interest in tracking flights. They're so safe these days that we can kind of forget that we're talking about moving multi-ton vehicles over people's homes, churches, and schools, where anything going wrong can result in significant loss of life and property damage... At the very least, I want to know who and when as a societal tradeoff for the privilege of using the air over our heads freely.
(Also, that vested interest has been demonstrated in recent history. Keep in mind that it was ultimately plane-spotters who originally busted the extraordinary rendition policy of the US government open... They noticed planes had changed their regular flight patterns significantly).
People keep saying that yet no one has been able to define to me what “legitimate interest” the public has for tracking a private plane. I don’t believe one exists.
If you are sure of yourself, do a little experiment. If you truly believe it’s legitimate, why not just buy an AirTag and hide it on a person’s car…perhaps a local well known business owner. Create a website that publishes the live location of the vehicle. Let us know here how that goes for you.
There is also a pretty easy solution to this if you want privacy: sell the private jet and use charters. This is why Bernard Arnauld sold his recently.
Commercial flight trackers encourage enthusiasts to feed them data, then take money from operators to hide that data. If you want everyone to have access to the data, consider feeding a network that doesn't censor or block anything, like ADS-B Exchange (https://www.adsbexchange.com/).
A project like Dictator Alert (https://dictatoralert.org/) uses ADS-B Exchange because the authoritarian regimes they're tracking can just pay a commercial site to hide their aircraft—they don't like being tracked.
My Advisory Circular bots (https://skycircl.es/bots/), which tweet in real time whenever they detect police, FBI, military, news or fire aircraft circling, and my "What's Overhead?" Siri shortcut (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1238149529469202433) use ADS-B Exchange because a lot of the most interesting aircraft are the ones that are blocked on commercial trackers.
I suppose a decent, easy system for evading its tracking would just be for rich people to swap keys to their private jets. Or chartering. Or flying commercial. Etc.
reply