How to upset Russian freight companies, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Chinese authorities and media personality Kylie Jenner in one go? Track their jets.
Flight-following Web sites and Twitter accounts offer real-time views of air traffic — and sometimes major news like US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip — but that exposure draws pushback ranging from complaints to gear seizures.
Whether Russian air freight firms, Saudi Arabian plane owners or others, Dan Streufert, founder of the US-based flight tracking site ADS-B Exchange, said his group gets dozens of “requests” each year to stop posting aircraft’s whereabouts.
Photo: AP
“We have not removed anything so far. This is all public information, and I don’t want to be the arbiter of who’s right and who’s wrong,” Streufert said.
Limits do apply in some cases, but groups that piece together the flight paths say that the core information source is legally available and open to anyone with the right gear.
US rules require planes in designated areas be equipped with ADS-B technology, which broadcasts aircraft positions using signals that relatively simple equipment can pick up.
Services such as Sweden-based Flightradar24 has 34,000 mostly volunteer-operated receivers around the world to pick up the signals, a key source of information, which the firm routs back to a central network and combines it with data on flight schedules and aircraft information.
Figuring out or confirming to whom a plane belongs can require some sleuthing, said jet tracker Jack Sweeney, who filed a public records request with the US government that yielded a form bearing the signature of a particular plane’s owner: Elon Musk.
Sweeney has gotten quite a bit of attention with his Twitter account that tracks the movements of the billionaire’s plane and even rejected Musk’s offer of US$5,000 to shut down @ElonJet, which has more than 480,000 followers.
“There’s so much traction, I’m doing something right. The celebrity thing — people like seeing what celebrities are doing, that and the whole emissions thing,” he said, referring to concerns over the planes’ greenhouse gas emissions. “Putting it on Twitter makes it easier for people to access and understand.”
Another of Sweeney’s Twitter accounts, powered by data provided by ADS-B Exchange, last month showed that Jenner’s plane took a flight in California that lasted just 17 minutes.
The Internet was not pleased, and she faced a torrent of criticism on social media over concerns about the message it sent regarding climate change.
“They tell us working class people to feel bad about our once-a-year flight to a much needed vacation while these celebs take private jets every other day as if it’s an Uber,” one Twitter user wrote, in an example of the outrage.
Neither Sweeney nor Streufert evoked a distinct red line they were concerned could be crossed by publishing the flight data.
“We will track anything because honestly, if somebody really was a bad actor, and they wanted to know where this stuff is, you can build the electronics for US$100 and just deploy receivers to pick up the same signals yourself,” Streufert said.
“The data is already out there,” Sweeney said. “I’m just redistributing it.”
There is also money to be made, but it is not clear how much — Streufert said he makes a living, but declined to provide specifics, while Sweeney said his flight-tracking work brought in about US$100 a month.
Flightradar24 did not provide its revenue.
The services’ information — as recently shown by the hundreds of thousands watching whether Pelosi would defy China’s warnings — has significant potential effects far beyond embarrassment of celebrities or the rankling of billionaires.
For example, ADS-B Exchange’s data was cited in a nonprofit group’s report accusing EU border agency Frontex worked to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean, while US media used it to show surveillance planes flew over racial justice protests in Washington in 2020.
Dozens of US Congress members responded to the revelations by signing on to a letter urging the FBI and other US government entities such as the National Guard to “cease surveilling peaceful protests immediately and permanently.”
In some parts of the world, governments have made clear the technology and resulting information is not welcome.
Chinese state media last year reported that Beijing had confiscated hundreds of receivers used in crowd-sourced flight tracking, citing the risk of “espionage.”
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