It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.
Transponders are in planes mostly for safety. Their automated dissemination is part of the safety mechanisms of that transport medium and putting up with them (when required) is part of the privilege of using that public good. Similar to requiring drivers licenses to drive.
"Why can the government force me to display a license plate on my car? I'm an innocent citizen; they have no right to force me to bear a code like I'm a criminal."
The privilege of operating on public roadways imposes some obligations on vehicle operators. What those obligations should be is a pros-cons trade-off that has little to do with the criminal-guilt threshold.
If the tech is cheap enough, there are a lot of hypothetical upsides to constantly tracking every multi-ton machine on the road. Observe, for comparison, the FAA requirements for flight plans and running a broadcasting transponder to safely operate an airplane.
I’m fine with planes being tracked, I’m not necessarily fine with cars being tracked.
Cars don’t have to broadcast their location to not get blown up by air defense. Planes do. And we’re legally allowed to listen to all wireless frequencies.
I don't want this to be taken as a blanket claim that there is no merit to considerations of privacy in this realm, but there is a critical distinction between flight tracking and license plate vehicle tracking. Am infinitesimally small proportion of people have to fly private planes without option. American society has become such that the same cannot so be definitively said about automobiles. For large segments of the population, their cars are, for better or worse, a necessity of their daily lives and opting out of their use would be tantamount to opting out of society as it is. Yes, people can move to places where cars aren't needed, either because other forms of transportation can fulfill they're requirements or because life becomes hyper localized and there's no need to travel the distances licensed vehicles are required for. But not everyone can do that, literally; hyper localized loves are typically underpinned by other people bringing crap to you in vehicles with license plates being tracked. For many people, getting between a job they need and a neighborhood they can afford to live in, requires a private car. Having those people movements tracked it's more of a concern to me than done rich person who decides to take their personal plane to Aspen for the weekend.
Certainly. And I doubt I would annoy many people due to locality, odds of them simply not driving past the thing, and of course, only a few people knowing I'm doing plate scanning and posting it online.
This is a government program, mandate even, with easily-downloaded data feeds.
My 'you can track my plane when...' was hyperbole for the moment. ADS-B compliance cost me a few thousand dollars. Getting off of the public 'radar' with my plane is on my 'get to it eventually' list of things to do. Somewhere around refinishing my deck and swapping my winter tires back for all-season. I'm bothered philosophically, but my actions say I'm not that bothered.
But to your point, if the government required all car owners to pop a GPS tag onto their honda, at a cost to them of a few hundred bucks, then gave the 24/7 surveillance data to the public freely, I can see a few noses being tweaked for a few different reasons.
Edit -- I guess this thread is getting too deep for more replies. Aircraft have registration numbers painted on their side. That's the analogy to license plates which are publicly visible, and systems do exist to video-capture those numbers (usually for billing purposes -- Vector is one I know of). ADS-B is automatic reporting/broadcasting by the aircraft itself. It is collected and distributed by government, and it is also capture-able by anyone with a receiver. I am not aware of any cars which broadcast their movements 24/7 to government, nor any initiative to make that happen at car-owner expense, nor the ability for one to capture that data freely on radio bands.
But I think the 'of interest to society' argument against cars is equally strong. Which was the original idea I was replying to. :)
I highly doubt you are pro privacy even a little bit, and it is foolish endeavour to trade liberty for promised safety..
You start off on the assumption that everyone agrees that aircraft should be tracked, and that data should be open to law enforcement review with no warrant. To the extent the data can be justified for safety it should be limited to that purpose only and barred by law from being used in any other manner. That is not how the law is today, as these records are used in all kinds of legal cases (both civil and criminal) outside of need for safety.
People that are actually pro privacy understand how these records are used and do not desire to see it expand to the tracking of every car on the road as a car is much more personally identifiable than a plane, and is in much more common usage.
in short, Maybe automobiles should not be treated differently and maybe it is time to look at how aircraft are tracked and what that tracking is used for changing the law to be more privacy focused
I was conceding the point of the comment I was responding to, of "all cars having some kind of telemetry in them", and I think in 5 years or so that will actually be true anyways.
I just don't agree that sticking a transponder on my car --- that I'm free to remove if I see it --- is really all that intrusive. It seems less intrusive than them staring through the windows of my car.
Cars, especially in the US, is very closely linked to the location of a person. For private aircraft that is generally not the case I assume.
I work for a semi-governmental organization in the Netherlands and we track ships. Tracking company-owned commercial ships is no problem, but we are heavily restricted by law in what we can do with the location data of privately owned ships because people live on them.
Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? Far more people are killed and injured by vehicles than are killed by aircraft. In general I'm pretty pro-privacy but I've had way too many close calls and accidents with bad drivers who were found to be at fault. Maybe there's a better way to get to vision zero, and if so I'd love to hear it.
Not because of disingenuous "car has a right to privacy" logic but because any judge would conclude that by tracking a car you're tracking the owner of the car and the owner does have a right to privacy.
I think you'll find that it has far more to do with directly interfering with another person's property without permission. If you publish someone's coordinates by using publicly accessible traffic cameras or (cost considerations aside) flying your own news helicopter around, the arguments become a lot vaguer. It's not clear that there's a legal/constitutional right to privacy in the US, and indeed recent supreme court decisions about abortion seem to reject the notion; jurisprudence in the 1970s saw an implicit right to privacy in certain constitutional provisions, an idea which 'originalists' regard as BS.
If you are ok with Elon Musk (or any other plane) being trackable, you should be ok to have your license plate tracked and your movements published wherever you go.
... oh, are you assuming their car will be allowed on the road without the tools to properly track it? I was assuming that as those tools become cheap they become mandatory to operate on public roads (i.e. toll roads or passive highway traffic monitors can serve as checkpoints: scan car transponders and license plates, match them up, identify vehicles on the road without transponders, flag them for intercept by police. Or, easier: transponder functionality is an inspection requirement and if your transponder is out, you don't pass inspection and you can't legally operate on public roads).
This seems like a non-sequitur? Cars can't track your every movement. But that phone in your pocket is already doing that. Even if it isn't recorded by the phone, the cell towers that your phone is in constant communication with to actually work can do so. Add in the ridiculously lax methodology we took for bluetooth scanning and connection to work, and you leak more information than your car can do well before the car gets internet connected.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a bit concerned about internet connected cars, too. But privacy seems a weak angle there. I'm much more concerned with safety than I am privacy. I fully expect that with all of the license scanners that exist today, if the government wanted to track my movements, that ship sailed a long time ago. I'm not convinced that having the ability to connect to my car from remote is at all safe. Especially to the control facilities.
Transponders are in planes mostly for safety. Their automated dissemination is part of the safety mechanisms of that transport medium and putting up with them (when required) is part of the privilege of using that public good. Similar to requiring drivers licenses to drive.
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