Pretty sure they would need to prove an intent to stalk and harass as opposed to being aviation enthusiasts. If Taylor doesn't like it there are a number of ways to avoid being tracked, and the cost to avoid tracking would be a rounding error in computing her daily expenses.
> If Taylor doesn't like it there are a number of ways to avoid being tracked, and the cost to avoid tracking would be a rounding error in computing her daily expenses.
Is that true? I assumed not, because otherwise these celebrities would be doing it. How would it be done?
There are a number of ways to avoid being tracked [1], and interestingly the Vox or NYT podcast where I heard about them indicated that Swift was in the program(s). Based on this quote from the article, it does seem that there are ways to still get the data, "Many private owners signed up for the Limited Aircraft Display Data (LADD) program, but sources that don’t use FAA data aren’t obligated to obey those restrictions and can still publish the information emitted from a jet’s transponder."
NetJets has a large fleet of aircraft similar to those that are typically used as private jets. You pay to use some of the fleet like a taxi. Whenever you take a flight, you are the only party on the flight. If you take a lot of flights, you pay more. But you don't own any of the jets, so it can't be tracked as easily as a jet that you own.
OT: On FlightAware most of the time all the plane icons are the same color. But sometimes I'll see a plane of a different color, and every time I've seen that it has been a NetJets flight.
When I then zoom out it appears that every NetJets flight is getting that special color.
NetJets are usually the same color as all the others. So it appears that FlightAware for some reason just occasionally decides to highlight NetJets.
Anyone happen to know why? And is it really only NetJets, or have I just not happened to be looking when they highlighted something else?
Famous people face repeated serious threats and become paranoid. They probably have hired security firms that find this stuff online and freak out, or get into the ear of the client, and then try to 'fix' it even if it's not 100% realistic.
This was also while Elon was spewing that he was a "free speech absolutist" yet was kicking very specific accounts off Twitter. So the hypocrisy was a little different.
What does "free speech absolutist" even mean? Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre is OK? Lying while under oath is not perjury? Distributing CSM? Going to a public playground and shouting expletives?
She's not an asshole (publicly, anyway) so I would imagine she doesn't have people (in the mainstream) waiting to pounce on her for fragility and hypocrisy. Well the latter wouldn't apply to her the way it did with Musk, anyway.
It's silly to pretend this is an issue people have strong opinions about in a vaccuum, divorced from how they feel about the subject. Which is another way of saying it's one of those things that doesn't deserve to be news, it just happens to involve a celebrity.
> It's silly to pretend this is an issue people have strong opinions about in a vaccuum, divorced from how they feel about the subject.
If true this is actually really sad. If people can't have the same stance on harassment/stalking/whatever-this-thing-is regardless of if they like the victim or not it's really sad.
Being sad that you can't go through life openly unlikeable without having people root against you is like being sad that the sun goes down each night. Best to accept it as a fundamental rule and save your feelings.
On a practical note if privacy and security is so important to Swift she could easily use a fractional program to rotate tail and serial numbers.
Not sure why I find this so grating but the idea that an aircraft using the public commons, funded by taxpayers, as an anonymous medium that conceals their immense wealth sort of strikes me as the equivalent of someone saying “my Benz doesn’t need license plates because I’m really really rich.”
A few hours later, I found out that Apple's other cofounder, Steve Wozniak, who was a prolific prankster, called up the Cupertino police and reported that a silver Mercedes was illegally parked in a handicapped space and told them the person reporting it was Andy Hertzfeld, giving them my phone number at work.
The Privacy ICAO Address Program. You get a temporary ICAO addresses to broadcast which are not associated with the Civil Aircraft Registry and a third-party callsign. Only works in US airspace is my understanding though.
The Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) program from the FAA only filters what gets shown in data feeds from the FAA. Something like ADS-B which gets the actual live data from the aircraft is unfiltered.
Airplanes have the equivalent of a license plate painted on the side.
What's different is the broadcast in-the-clear of your information of where you are at all times; not many cars have that feature.
For airplanes, this is the equivalent of broadcasting "Hey, so-and-so is away from home in his airplane; and here's their home address, you are probably safe to go to their house and burgle it."
Unless the aircraft owner has a Delaware corporation for it, of course.
I'm guessing Taylor's home(s) have someone keeping an eye on them even when she's away, so that doesn't seem relevant. It would also apply to anyone with a private jet like hers.
> Not sure why I find this so grating but the idea that an aircraft using the public commons, funded by taxpayers, as an anonymous medium that conceals their immense wealth
How would not being tracked in near real-time conceal their wealth?
Hey Tay, just Shake It Off. Really. You have no expectation of privacy using public airspace. If you don't want to be tracked, you probably shouldn't be traveling in a flying machine emblazoned with registration marks. Maybe try the train.
Edit: now that I think about it for more than sixteen seconds, couldn't that be a marketing opportunity in disguise (as if her act needs more marketing)? "Know when she flies over your house! Get a selfie with the contrail in the background! Most likes on a tiktok gets a personal response saying thanks for thinking of me!"
Do you have an expectation of privacy when you broadcast signals out of your house using the public electromagnetic spectrum?
FWIW, I'm on the side of privacy being an overrated concern. I've been hearing people yammer on about it since the Slashdot days. It's well-tread territory and I've heard every argument in support of privacy on forums like these.
What I don't see very often is an examination of the negative sides of privacy and the positive side of public information. After decades of privacy, dare I say extremism, we have people who would, eg, do away with public records for private property ownership, which seems anthemic to the very notion of a republic.
EDIT: I'm serious, just downvote away, I know that this is an unpopular opinion, but I would appreciate if at least one person engaged in this dialog beyond clicking a button!
What benefit is there to society or really, anyone to public records for private property ownership?
In my city, you can go to a website, type the first three characters of a name, and instantly get the full names and addresses of anyone who matches and owns a home.
To my mind, this is beyond absurd. This is a major safety risk with no benefits whatsoever. It's also the #1 reason I continue to rent.
You have it exactly backwards. Why should anyone on the whole Internet have access to my physical address? I reject someone's pull request on github and now I have to worry they might show up at my door? Fuck everything about that.
You have yet to give a single reason why it needs to be public
If you need to sue me for dumping chemicals, you can pretty well be bothered to go down to the clerk and show your own ID. It's not a problem. There is no need for my home address to be searchable by the whole Internet
There is a world of a difference between us looking after each other and them looking after us.
Put this in the context of the liberal democratic republic as it was born from monarchy: we must leave the “benevolent”, God-graced structure of government behind. In its stead is the common man governing himself, and with all the faults and warts, it is still more conducive to our expected freedoms.
There is not much more of an argument than I can offer other than the hundreds of years of actual practice.
> What I don't see very often is an examination of the negative sides of privacy and the positive side of public information.
If you feel that way, feel free to explore and examine that. The down votes are most likely because you brought it up without actually examining it.
> After decades of privacy, dare I say extremism, we have people who would, eg, do away with public records for private property ownership, which seems anthemic to the very notion of a republic.
Privacy is popular in HN comments, but the only thing I've seen, in terms of government policy and corporate policy, is a massive all-out-war against the right to privacy.
Dude, downvotes are a popularity contest. If I had posted with the exact same style and substance but aligned with popular sentiment, I would have gotten upvotes.
What if someone made a website listing all of everyone's travels, live - where everyone is at all times. It would be dystopian.
I think the free speech issue - it's public data - trumps all. And the risk that powerful people will have different laws and protections, where rights are supposed to protect the vulnerable, would be a very dangerous precedent.
At the same time, I don't think this data should be public for anyone.
> You have no expectation of privacy using public airspace.
Perhaps legally, but as we have seen elsewhere, with computing capabilities, that antiquated (IMHO) notion yields dystopian totalitarianism. Walking down the street in 1789 was anonymous unless someone happened to see you, and then the spread of their knowledge was limited to custom-manufactured physical objects moving at the speed of a horse.
We do have an expectation of privacy generally, and that is nullified if we reduce it to an EM-shielded, soundproofed basement with the windows boarded up.
There are tons of websites listing all commercial flights. If you don’t want to be tracked, you just need to travel like everyone else rather than on a private jet, the most wasteful form of travel.
But it's not everyone's travels. It's the travels of an airplane. Which are all public information.
Her problem is that she feels entitled to tens or hundreds of thousands of times more airplane travel than the average person (private plane only carrying her/her friends), and is trivial to deanonymize.
She should try flying coach. Or at least charter. I've flown on aircraft that also broadcast all their flight information, yet you have no idea about which flights I took - because I am not so vain and self-centered (and wealthy) as to fly in a private, personal jet.
(If she can't handle coach, she could always plane-pool with her other billionaire friends. Then we'd have no idea of where she is at any particular moment. But I understand that takes most of the kick out of private jets.)
This could be a good argument, but we are specifically talking about flying private aircraft which is public info (and for good reason).
I know it wouldn’t quite work because people would notice it’s Taylor Swift or Elon Musk or whomever but she could fly on a commercial plane like I do and that wouldn’t be tracked publicly.
Unfortunately being an interesting person means people are interested in everything you do. It comes with being famous. Maybe she could stop being on commercials or posting on social media or something to help reduce her popularity since it’s a problem?
Genuinely asking - what's the good reason why flying private aircraft is public info?
I believe it's only public by technological accident. A hunter taking his Super Cub out in Alaska, for example, won't have his information available to anyone except people who see the plane if it's not equipped with ADS-B out, and very possibly not even then if he doesn't fly in range of a ground station.
If she flies her plane on the Moon (chortle), or some other place without any tracking infrastructure, her plane's location won't be available to anyone, either.
Unfortunately for her, she wants to have her plane flown in areas with infrastructure, and congested airspace, where its location and identification needs to be known to everyone for safety reasons.
Likewise, she's free to buy a superyacht, and sail it out in the middle of nowhere with her transpounders off, but she can't be pissed if someone starts tracking every time that that yacht causes tens of thousands of cars to stop because the folding bridge on SR-520 has to be raised[1] to let it through...
[1] Thankfully, since the bridge was rebuilt with more clearance, this is no longer an issue. But in the years prior, I had absolutely zero sympathy for any of the rich pricks that would stop the movement of tens of thousands of people because they wanted to sail their yacht around the lake. If someone kept a website with a high score of who was the most disruptive Seattle millionaire when it came to that, I'd have been delighted.
The owner's not identified, the plane is, so that ATC (or, in the case of an incredibly unusual emergency, another plane) knows who to call.
She can always operate her plane in VFR mode in airspace where (because of fewer safety concerns for those modes of operation) a transponder doesn't need to be turned on.
Airspace is a 'public' space, but it's public space that requires very clear tracking of objects occupying it, because of high risks to human life. It requires permission, and following very particular rules and notification for entering it. Flying is not like taking a stroll down to the corner store.
Notice that driving also requires you to broadcast your vehicle's identification, in the form of a license plate. But because the safety concerns in play are different, it's only broadcast in the visible spectrum.
That's not true for many, many planes, and there are very many private planes that are not jets and the owners are not rich. Thousands and thousands are homebuilts.
Go to https://www.faa.gov, and on the front page there's a place to enter an airplane registration number and get, along with other info, the name and address of the owner.
The vast majority of airspace does not "require very clear tracking of objects", and is less controlled than a highway. It does not require particular permission besides following the "rules of the road", and is free to use with nobody knowing you're there. I must assume you are referring to airspace which is either around busy airports (cities) or very high (airliner territory) - Class A/B/C/D airspaces.
I mean, we DO track flights publicly using sites like FlightRadar. Taylor Swift just happens to own a plane and what people track is the plane, not her. If the plan flies without her, the trackers don't know. Not unless they augment that information with spotters that have a clear view of the boarding activity of the plane.
> If you don't want to be tracked, you probably shouldn't be traveling in a flying machine emblazoned with registration marks. Maybe try the train.
Note that this exact same argument applies to traveling by private car- The number plates are required by law to be clearly visible, so it must be ok to track as well.
This is blatantly false. Tracking someone in public is still stalking. In fact, it's literally stalking (if you followed someone in a private area, you'd likely get trespassing charges on top).
Sending letters asking people not to do something is also very legal. Also, stalking and/or laws are entirely unrelated to whether or not ADSB data is legally collected. It's a different issue entirely.
It's legal to look in a phone book, but that doesn't mean you can't harass someone over the phone.
She very kindly types up when and where she plans on being and publishes it on her website, but I guess that's not a security issue because it makes her money.
> They will know where she is going to so they can plan to get there.
Let's say that they do and they even manage to show up at LAX 20 minutes before her plane lands. Now what? Honestly. It's not as if they can just hang around at the baggage claim and find her there. What do you think they can do now? Surround the entire airport and stop every single vehicle from leaving until they find the one with her in it?
Bill Murray said that when people claim they want to be rich and famous:
I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.
As a professional who flies much of her life, ad hoc arrangements would be insufficient. You can't have the overhead and stress of figuring out and adjusting to something new every day. She lives on the road (much of the time) - it's her home, effectively. It's not a vacation or a business trip.
> You can't have the overhead and stress of figuring out and adjusting to something new every day.
you mean like literally everyone else who doesn't own a private jet does? Anyone who can afford a private jet can easily afford to hire someone else to figure out the details and make the needed travel arrangements for them.
The staff person could even hold the "feels like Taylor's home" kit and pre-install it on any private jet she flies on. They could even pay for multiple jets take off from wherever she is, so people can't tell which one she's on.
> They could even pay for multiple jets take off from wherever she is, so people can't tell which one she's on.
That would cause even more bad press about how wasteful and bad for the environment her travel is though, and managing her image is what this lawsuit is largely about.
As a technical solution: Could the identifier be per flight and anonymous, rather than having ID be per plane, with the owner/user published (where?)? Would that meet other needs?
The FAA could have a database connecting flight IDs with (confidential) plane IDs.
They already have a Privacy IACO aircraft address, you file some paperwork to the FAA, and you can rotate your aircraft's identifier every 60 days [1]. However this is only for domestic flights, and wouldn't work when flying out of or into the United States.
Honestly, I think anything that brings more attention to the stupendously wasteful travel habits of wealthy individuals such as celebrities and politicians is a public good and should be encouraged.
Ms. Swift has essentially unlimited resources to protect her privacy, so perhaps she should choose a method of transportation that doesn't involve broadcasting ADS-B information across the continent as she travels.
In situations like this, I always wonder why you start with a threatening letter from the lawyers, and not just a phone call between the two parties, where one of them would say "hey look, I know you can do this, but it makes me scared for my safety—I think you can understand why—and I really hope you'd consider not doing it". Start from that, rather than just going straight to threats. You can always be a dick later, try being a human first.
That said, I'm actually on her side here. I don't like being tracked on the internet, and I do everything I can to avoid it. I can't imagine someone following me around, and me being persuaded by the argument that I'm in a public space, so I have no expectation of privacy. As far as I know, there isn't another option except to be in the public space if I want to get somewhere. And I think people who track other people because they can, and you can't stop me are in many ways worse than people whose motives are entirely venal. Just act like grown-up, civilized human beings.
> You can always be a dick later, try being a human first.
This I agree with.
> I don't like being tracked on the internet, and I do everything I can to avoid it.
That's the difference. Swift could avoid being tracked by plane too, but she doesn't want to because it would mean she'd lose the advantage of having her own private jet. The price of having a private jet is having your travels tracked. There are a lot of benefits to fame, and a lot of downsides. You take the good with the bad. In the case, the bad is that people are going to know and complain about how wasteful and bad for the environment her air travel is.
Tweeting about where a public figure's private plan goes doesn't even come close to the levels of obnoxiousness that paparazzi rise to.
> As far as I know, there isn't another option except to be in the public space if I want to get somewhere.
And you have no expectation of privacy in public, which is why you are already tracked and recorded every time you step outside no matter where you go just like I am. Neither of us have the kind of money and resources to protect ourselves that celebrities do either.
There's a whole demographic of people that stalk and threaten her, and now a political party and a news platform that are pushing a narrative of war with her to their irrational followers who have shown they are willing to act violently and criminally. And unsurprisingly, the comments here predictably sound similar to that group.
Personal safety is a perfectly reasonable concern to have.
> The December letter from Swift’s attorney states that Sweeney’s actions are “in violation of several state laws” but does not specify them. The letter does, however, cite nine anonymous Instagram comments
...meanwhile, the fbi (or any agency, dhs etc) has access to everyone's pinpoint location via third party data brokers. yet here we are, arguing for the anonymity of a JET OWNED AND USED BY A CELEBRITY
> The pop star has routinely faced stalkers showing up outside her homes
As a child raised in a Soviet, and then ex-Soviet country, my precious belly fat is boiling with (maybe baseless) rage. Homes. Plural.
She should contract Musk to build her a hyperloop network between them all and play whack-a-mole with the alleged stalkers. With the added benefit that media won't shut up about for another decade. Who knows, might also be cheaper than all those attorneys on retainer.
While I strongly oppose the tactic of threatening legal action against someone aggregating legally acquired information, I don't think it'd be unreasonable for Swift and others to lobby for an aircraft registration system that improved owner privacy without compromising safety, and would even support such measures, so long as implementation costs are borne by the owners in question.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadIs that true? I assumed not, because otherwise these celebrities would be doing it. How would it be done?
[1] - https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/how-airliners-keep-pr...
When I then zoom out it appears that every NetJets flight is getting that special color.
NetJets are usually the same color as all the others. So it appears that FlightAware for some reason just occasionally decides to highlight NetJets.
Anyone happen to know why? And is it really only NetJets, or have I just not happened to be looking when they highlighted something else?
And the code: https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify
It's silly to pretend this is an issue people have strong opinions about in a vaccuum, divorced from how they feel about the subject. Which is another way of saying it's one of those things that doesn't deserve to be news, it just happens to involve a celebrity.
If true this is actually really sad. If people can't have the same stance on harassment/stalking/whatever-this-thing-is regardless of if they like the victim or not it's really sad.
If people are not able to have a principled stance on right or wrong without calibrating their response based on who the victim is, it's sad.
Not sure why I find this so grating but the idea that an aircraft using the public commons, funded by taxpayers, as an anonymous medium that conceals their immense wealth sort of strikes me as the equivalent of someone saying “my Benz doesn’t need license plates because I’m really really rich.”
Reminds me of Job's trick around that - https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l... (and probably what you're referring to).
The rich will always have ways of throwing money at annoyances that us poors do not have; and we will always laugh at them for it.
A few hours later, I found out that Apple's other cofounder, Steve Wozniak, who was a prolific prankster, called up the Cupertino police and reported that a silver Mercedes was illegally parked in a handicapped space and told them the person reporting it was Andy Hertzfeld, giving them my phone number at work.
The Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) program from the FAA only filters what gets shown in data feeds from the FAA. Something like ADS-B which gets the actual live data from the aircraft is unfiltered.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
What's different is the broadcast in-the-clear of your information of where you are at all times; not many cars have that feature.
For airplanes, this is the equivalent of broadcasting "Hey, so-and-so is away from home in his airplane; and here's their home address, you are probably safe to go to their house and burgle it."
Unless the aircraft owner has a Delaware corporation for it, of course.
Like, the local baker in Chicago who flies up to Racine in the morning to pick up kringles for an event he's catering that afternoon.
"Regular" folks in their "regular" vehicles, as opposed to chauffeur-driven luxury vehicles owned or used by the wealthy.
How would not being tracked in near real-time conceal their wealth?
Edit: now that I think about it for more than sixteen seconds, couldn't that be a marketing opportunity in disguise (as if her act needs more marketing)? "Know when she flies over your house! Get a selfie with the contrail in the background! Most likes on a tiktok gets a personal response saying thanks for thinking of me!"
Replace airspace with "space". Public figure in a public space. They always want the perks without the cost.
Now, not being harrased is another thing. But not being noticed? (Specially in an airplane) Haters gonna hate.
Epilogue: Yes, any publicity is publicity. I am even considering her AI releases, and the acompaning complains, a public stunt.
What does this mean? Do you mean that she arranged for AI porn of herself to be released?
Isn't that how you turn from a C-lister to a B-lister, not something you do when you're already at the top of the pile?
FWIW, I'm on the side of privacy being an overrated concern. I've been hearing people yammer on about it since the Slashdot days. It's well-tread territory and I've heard every argument in support of privacy on forums like these.
What I don't see very often is an examination of the negative sides of privacy and the positive side of public information. After decades of privacy, dare I say extremism, we have people who would, eg, do away with public records for private property ownership, which seems anthemic to the very notion of a republic.
EDIT: I'm serious, just downvote away, I know that this is an unpopular opinion, but I would appreciate if at least one person engaged in this dialog beyond clicking a button!
OK. "anthemic" does not mean what you think it means.
"anathema" maybe?
In my city, you can go to a website, type the first three characters of a name, and instantly get the full names and addresses of anyone who matches and owns a home.
To my mind, this is beyond absurd. This is a major safety risk with no benefits whatsoever. It's also the #1 reason I continue to rent.
How do you prove you own the land and not the person who is trespassing?
How do you know who to tax?
How do you know who to fine if they dump chemicals in their backyard?
How do you know that everyone is being treated fairly under the law?
And why should the government have privileged information for all of these necessary records for private property?
It's fine that you have found some negative scenarios, but any changes to this practice must address what would be lost!
If you need to sue me for dumping chemicals, you can pretty well be bothered to go down to the clerk and show your own ID. It's not a problem. There is no need for my home address to be searchable by the whole Internet
Put this in the context of the liberal democratic republic as it was born from monarchy: we must leave the “benevolent”, God-graced structure of government behind. In its stead is the common man governing himself, and with all the faults and warts, it is still more conducive to our expected freedoms.
There is not much more of an argument than I can offer other than the hundreds of years of actual practice.
If you feel that way, feel free to explore and examine that. The down votes are most likely because you brought it up without actually examining it.
> After decades of privacy, dare I say extremism, we have people who would, eg, do away with public records for private property ownership, which seems anthemic to the very notion of a republic.
Privacy is popular in HN comments, but the only thing I've seen, in terms of government policy and corporate policy, is a massive all-out-war against the right to privacy.
I think the free speech issue - it's public data - trumps all. And the risk that powerful people will have different laws and protections, where rights are supposed to protect the vulnerable, would be a very dangerous precedent.
At the same time, I don't think this data should be public for anyone.
> You have no expectation of privacy using public airspace.
Perhaps legally, but as we have seen elsewhere, with computing capabilities, that antiquated (IMHO) notion yields dystopian totalitarianism. Walking down the street in 1789 was anonymous unless someone happened to see you, and then the spread of their knowledge was limited to custom-manufactured physical objects moving at the speed of a horse.
We do have an expectation of privacy generally, and that is nullified if we reduce it to an EM-shielded, soundproofed basement with the windows boarded up.
Her problem is that she feels entitled to tens or hundreds of thousands of times more airplane travel than the average person (private plane only carrying her/her friends), and is trivial to deanonymize.
She should try flying coach. Or at least charter. I've flown on aircraft that also broadcast all their flight information, yet you have no idea about which flights I took - because I am not so vain and self-centered (and wealthy) as to fly in a private, personal jet.
(If she can't handle coach, she could always plane-pool with her other billionaire friends. Then we'd have no idea of where she is at any particular moment. But I understand that takes most of the kick out of private jets.)
I know it wouldn’t quite work because people would notice it’s Taylor Swift or Elon Musk or whomever but she could fly on a commercial plane like I do and that wouldn’t be tracked publicly.
Unfortunately being an interesting person means people are interested in everything you do. It comes with being famous. Maybe she could stop being on commercials or posting on social media or something to help reduce her popularity since it’s a problem?
I believe it's only public by technological accident. A hunter taking his Super Cub out in Alaska, for example, won't have his information available to anyone except people who see the plane if it's not equipped with ADS-B out, and very possibly not even then if he doesn't fly in range of a ground station.
Unfortunately for her, she wants to have her plane flown in areas with infrastructure, and congested airspace, where its location and identification needs to be known to everyone for safety reasons.
Likewise, she's free to buy a superyacht, and sail it out in the middle of nowhere with her transpounders off, but she can't be pissed if someone starts tracking every time that that yacht causes tens of thousands of cars to stop because the folding bridge on SR-520 has to be raised[1] to let it through...
[1] Thankfully, since the bridge was rebuilt with more clearance, this is no longer an issue. But in the years prior, I had absolutely zero sympathy for any of the rich pricks that would stop the movement of tens of thousands of people because they wanted to sail their yacht around the lake. If someone kept a website with a high score of who was the most disruptive Seattle millionaire when it came to that, I'd have been delighted.
How do identification of the plane and/or of its owner contribute to safety?
She can always operate her plane in VFR mode in airspace where (because of fewer safety concerns for those modes of operation) a transponder doesn't need to be turned on.
Airspace is a 'public' space, but it's public space that requires very clear tracking of objects occupying it, because of high risks to human life. It requires permission, and following very particular rules and notification for entering it. Flying is not like taking a stroll down to the corner store.
Notice that driving also requires you to broadcast your vehicle's identification, in the form of a license plate. But because the safety concerns in play are different, it's only broadcast in the visible spectrum.
Go to https://www.faa.gov, and on the front page there's a place to enter an airplane registration number and get, along with other info, the name and address of the owner.
The vast majority of airspace does not "require very clear tracking of objects", and is less controlled than a highway. It does not require particular permission besides following the "rules of the road", and is free to use with nobody knowing you're there. I must assume you are referring to airspace which is either around busy airports (cities) or very high (airliner territory) - Class A/B/C/D airspaces.
Note that this exact same argument applies to traveling by private car- The number plates are required by law to be clearly visible, so it must be ok to track as well.
It's legal to look in a phone book, but that doesn't mean you can't harass someone over the phone.
Let's say that they do and they even manage to show up at LAX 20 minutes before her plane lands. Now what? Honestly. It's not as if they can just hang around at the baggage claim and find her there. What do you think they can do now? Surround the entire airport and stop every single vehicle from leaving until they find the one with her in it?
I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631
As someone else here said, she could fly on different (unknown) people's private jets, or a private jet service's.
Oh, but then it wouldn't be tricked out exactly the way she wants it. Tiny violins.
As I said: tiny violins.
you mean like literally everyone else who doesn't own a private jet does? Anyone who can afford a private jet can easily afford to hire someone else to figure out the details and make the needed travel arrangements for them.
That would cause even more bad press about how wasteful and bad for the environment her travel is though, and managing her image is what this lawsuit is largely about.
She got a lot of well-deserved PR points for generously paying everyone who helped with her tour. That was the opposite of this.
The FAA could have a database connecting flight IDs with (confidential) plane IDs.
[1] - https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Ms. Swift has essentially unlimited resources to protect her privacy, so perhaps she should choose a method of transportation that doesn't involve broadcasting ADS-B information across the continent as she travels.
That said, I'm actually on her side here. I don't like being tracked on the internet, and I do everything I can to avoid it. I can't imagine someone following me around, and me being persuaded by the argument that I'm in a public space, so I have no expectation of privacy. As far as I know, there isn't another option except to be in the public space if I want to get somewhere. And I think people who track other people because they can, and you can't stop me are in many ways worse than people whose motives are entirely venal. Just act like grown-up, civilized human beings.
This I agree with.
> I don't like being tracked on the internet, and I do everything I can to avoid it.
That's the difference. Swift could avoid being tracked by plane too, but she doesn't want to because it would mean she'd lose the advantage of having her own private jet. The price of having a private jet is having your travels tracked. There are a lot of benefits to fame, and a lot of downsides. You take the good with the bad. In the case, the bad is that people are going to know and complain about how wasteful and bad for the environment her air travel is.
Tweeting about where a public figure's private plan goes doesn't even come close to the levels of obnoxiousness that paparazzi rise to.
> As far as I know, there isn't another option except to be in the public space if I want to get somewhere.
And you have no expectation of privacy in public, which is why you are already tracked and recorded every time you step outside no matter where you go just like I am. Neither of us have the kind of money and resources to protect ourselves that celebrities do either.
Personal safety is a perfectly reasonable concern to have.
As a child raised in a Soviet, and then ex-Soviet country, my precious belly fat is boiling with (maybe baseless) rage. Homes. Plural.
She should contract Musk to build her a hyperloop network between them all and play whack-a-mole with the alleged stalkers. With the added benefit that media won't shut up about for another decade. Who knows, might also be cheaper than all those attorneys on retainer.