United States - Taylor Swift and others seek legal cover for concealing their personal jets; determined student persists in tracking them.
Elon Musk and others had already given Jack Sweeney money and made threats to him. Taylor Swift also got her lawyer involved in the matter. The target of their anger is Jack Sweeney, who runs a private jet tracking platform called "Ground Control." Sweeney uses publicly available data to track where someone is traveling with their private jet and how much fuel it consumes. This discomforts people like Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, as it reveals the true extent of their environmental footprint. Additionally, these individuals also see a security risk in having their flights tracked in real-time. Who would want everyone to know their location and travel plans? Sweeney spoke about his motivations in an interview with stern last year.
However, things have taken a turn. Due to public complaints and pressure, Taylor Swift has managed to get the United States to change the law. The new regulations allow for the anonymization of registration data from private jets, making it much harder to identify the charter aircraft. The change was signed into law by President Joe Biden.
But it doesn't look like Sweeney is ready to give up yet. Just earlier this month, he wrote on his X profile, "This doesn't stop us from tracking jets - we can still figure out who's who based on contextual clues." Sweeney then went on to elaborate in a series of tweets, "These measures introduced in the bill are often misinterpreted by the media as the be-all and end-all for tracking celebrity jets. My goal was to at least attempt to explain all the aspects, more than the reporters who don't fully understand the technology and the objections. But it's just full of jargon."
Indeed, it takes three pages for Sweeney to explain the situation, and it can get quite complex. Basically, he believes that regardless of the registration change, the planes will still have to send their GPS location via the "Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast" (ADS-B) system, which is used for tracking flights. If a plane changes its registration, it would be easy to track it back to its original position, as the change would be meaningless.
Sweeney states that the planes can be tracked as long as access to the ADS-B system is not restricted. In the initial draft of the law change, encryption of the system was planned, but it was removed before it was enacted.
Sweeney adds, "Just because an owner can hide their data from the FAA registry and make it 'private,' it's not illegal to track these jets. I was told that there are no laws that prohibit using public information to reach conclusions about the plane's owner."
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Despite the legal changes in the USA, millionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, and Bill Gates still face real-time tracking of their private jets by Jack Sweeney. Sweeney, a determined student, uses his platform "Ground Control" to track flight numbers and consumption of fuel in private jets, which disrupts the jet set lifestyle of these wealthy individuals. Even with regulatory changes, Sweeney believes he can still track planes using GPS location data sent via the ADS-B system. This system, while not encrypted as initially planned, provides enough public information for individuals like Sweeney to infer the ownership of the planes. Meanwhile, other millionaires such as Kylie Jenner's sister, Kylie Jenner, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos continue to use private jets, contributing to their environmental footprint and public scrutiny.
Source: www.stern.de
