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Comment by dtjb | Hacker News Reader

An important distinction, I think, is that Sweeney (@elonjet) appears to use a different tracker than the publicly available one. PIA is the freely available and public flight tracker, but can be put into private mode which Musk does. Sweeney then (likely) reverts to using non-public ICAO addresses which he identifies by manually coordinating Musk's known plane location/history.

I'm not an expert here, just sharing what I've seen. Please offer corrections.

https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288/phot...

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1603533380150181888

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That's false. Musk's jet is not enrolled in PIA, which is just a programme that obfuscates the ADS-B identifier from the FAA's registry. Spotters can still find the aircraft.

However as I said it's not true in this case, the FAA registry entry for the aircraft has the accurate ADS-B hex code identifier, and the aircraft is trackable openly on sites like ADSB Exchange and even using your own ~$20 hardware radio receiver.

Sweeney is doing nothing out of the ordinary for this particular aircraft other than linking the ADSB Exchange API to a Twitter account.

As an aside, there's also nothing illegal nor morally wrong about spotters deobfuscating a jet that's in the PIA programme either. That's just a fig leaf measure, it's not actually effective.

A lot people on Twitter seem to believe he is enrolled in PIA.

Probably because he was at one point. Even Sweeney bragged about getting around it: http://web.archive.org/web/20220204202539/https://twitter.co...

Might’ve been one of his other aircraft, or more likely he allowed it to lapse. PIA is something you have to keep updating/requesting to remain part of.

On his jet registration [1] it lists the code as A835AF and I believe this is the flight to LA in question [2]. This means that he was not using the spoofed ICAO code from PIA, broadcasting the publicly known one instead.

[1] https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

[2] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=37.359&lon=-...

So few people use a privacy codes it just makes it easier to track if he uses it.

It's the same situation with privacy features in browsers. All it does is give trackers another data point to cross reference with the things you can't or don't think to scrub.

the claim that he’s using PIA has been disproven dozens of times in the endless thread about the drama - how have you not seen any, not oookes into it yourself and still so confidently made an assertion?

this isn't my full time job.

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