Taylor Swift threatens legal action against student who tracks her jet
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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.
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.
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?
Is 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?
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.
It's legal to look in a phone book, but that doesn't mean you can't harass someone over the phone.
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.
The FAA could have a database connecting flight IDs with (confidential) plane IDs.
[1] - https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
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.
Personal safety is a perfectly reasonable concern to have.
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.
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?