I wouldn’t be surprised if even a fairly tenuous connection would be enough to serve as justification(it seems likely that “private jet owners and users” are a slightly more formidable lobby group than “people who think that little people have a right to track their betters and pesky investigative journalists”; if nothing else; with most of the real opposition being related to the fact that privacy-preserving air traffic control is probably more complex, more difficult, and more expensive than normal air traffic control and the FAA is mostly people who are more worried about aircraft actually crashing into one another than about some rich dude’s fretting about ‘assassination coordinates’).
That said, I’d be a little curious what the threat model would be:
If your enemies have surface to air missiles but either no other resources or no willingness to put in any effort; then you could definitely make a big difference by LADD-ing your way out of FAA feeds and operating under a PIA rather than exposing your actual ID on ADS-B broadcasts.
If it’s the much more likely case that you’ve got enemies with guns and some degree of motivation, though, it seems a lot less likely that the additional secrecy would be more than modestly helpful; especially for a prominent figure who has some parts of their itinerary publicly known in ways that help narrow down viable departure and arrival airports in ways that either allow you to simply meet them at the gate if their schedule narrows it down all the way or you guess correctly out of the modest number of alternatives; or allows for an inferential attack(PIAs, say, are only rotated periodically and do not replace the painted identifiers on a plane; so you only need someone with a decent zoom lens to establish a correlation between the actual plane and its obfuscated identifier until it gets rotated again.)
I’m a bit sad that Taylor Swift would put herself in the same camp as people like Musk. She seems so much more put together and progressive. I’m hoping this whole thing was an overreach by her extended team, rather than her personal decision.
I doubt she has any more of a legal case than Musk even though she’s obviously a much more sympathetic figure.
Maybe her team should have gone with a “please can you do Taylor a favor here, she’s legitimately afraid for her safety” approach instead of a “threatening but legally toothless demand letter” approach.
The social media account only posts arrivals and departures. Unless someone is camping right in the airport, is it a real security risk?
The site where he gets the data does have real-time position, which would allow a heads-up with time to get in position.
However, even if the site filtered out her aircraft, a $100 receiver in a good location for the target airport could also do that.
Aircraft announce their speed and position. That’s how it works. Solutions: charter an aircraft, fly public, or (for the ultra-rich) play three-plane monte.
I mean, that is the fear. Unlike most people, she actually has stalkers, including some guy they found in her apartment THREE TIMES. Christ, lock the guy up.
I don’t see why they don’t just post a 12 hour or 24 hour delay. You still get the transparency of how much she flies (which, yeah, I get both WHY she does it and WHY people are irked someone uses so much resources to fly so much). But, you put up a road bock for the low IQ stalker types. Are there still ways to track her movements via plane? Yes. And with her dating Kelce and touring, you will at least know where she will be some dates. But I feel like a time delay is a reasonable request/response. I don’t see what the real value of real time location if the purpose of the tracker is simply “transparency”.
I don’t know, I think this is still pretty esoteric. Much more likely that someone who’s motivated to do her harm would show up at a concert. Concert security has been upgraded since the Manchester attack, but I’d wager it’s still got nothing on airports. However I think putting it on a delay makes sense.
Still I really don’t think the safety thing is the issue here. Her fan base, rabid as they are, seems to have started to take notice of her jet usage. There were apparently negative comments on a post she put up with her and her boyfriend’s jets captioned “you want to take yours or mine?”
You’re going to have to show me that post because not only does that seem pretty off brand, Travis Kelce doesn’t have private jet. He has “take private jets” money, not “buy private jets” money.
I did google it and it sounds like there was a post like that, but posted by Kylie Jenner with Travis Scott. So if people are mad about that post, they are made at the wrong person.
Though I don’t doubt someone would spread a meme that made it look like she posted something like that.
Because knowing where a plane was yesterday doesn’t help you avoid crashing into it now. It’s not public information for the fun of it, it’s public information so that ATC and other aircraft know what’s in the air around them. Even if the FAA didn’t make their information accessible, anyone with a compatible radio can pick up and log ADS-B signals, and there’s already a large network of private individuals doing exactly that.
The information is public, in real time. It’s not difficult to access. Put one xitter account on a delay, another dozen can spring up tomorrow in real time. Even if you somehow manage to stop them all, the information is still readily available. If the concern is safety, whether someone uses a xitter account or accesses flight tracking data directly is irrelevant. It only matters if you’re concerned with presenting a bad image, and putting up a delay doesn’t change that.
