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.”
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
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.
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?