Yes and the location of a private plane does not publish someone's whereabouts. It's a freaking plane! That's about as accurate with respect to his whereabouts as Elon Musks home address (likely significantly less accurate).
I think my joke's been misinterpreted. Sharing personal information isn't the thing that different, it's the private jet location that's different from address and phone number. Having your private jet tracked is not a problem that a normal person can have. I don't think there's a reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to that.
Technically, maybe, but it also sounds a lot like a form of doxing. Where people live is not some highly classified secret, but collecting that data about people on a large scale, or posting it online, is not okay. In the same way, posting the whereabouts of someone's personal private plane[0] is not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation, and could be considered stalking.
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
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.
> The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
But nobody is "constantly tracking and publishing his whereabouts".
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
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.
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.
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.
Private jets don't get privacy by FAA rules. If anybody has an issue with that, they can either take it up with FAA or stop using a private jet. Banning an account on Twitter isn't doing anything.
As has been repeated often, aircraft movement information is public.
None of this represents tracking his or his family's real time location, because:
a) We can't tell which aircraft he is on from that data.
b) He can use other aircraft, including charters.
c) This only applies to while the aircraft is actually airborne or departing from or arriving at an airport, which is already easy to observe and record by spotters, and does not track him or his family anywhere else.
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.
The location of every plane that flies in the US (99.99999999%) is public data. If you want to take your big old metal tube up in the air, then you abide by the rules set forth by the party in charge of the air. We, as a society, have decided that those planes have an ID and if that plane wants to enter the air, then they agree to be tracked. That's the terms of service. There is no privacy violation.
There is nothing 'personally identifiable' about an airplane, it's a plane, not a person.
Posting your home address which you've kept out of the public eye is doxing, posting the whereabouts of any aircraft that broadcasts that information to all receivers is not. That's why you can find this information all over the internet, the only place where you currently can't find Musk's jet is on Twitter. And that's before we get into his free-speech arguments which apparently were a bit inconsistent.
Or would you like to accuse the FAA of doxing as well?
The solution to people knowing the location of your private plane is really simple: Don't own a private plane. Most of us are already doing it.
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