A new law aimed at deterring the curious public from tracking celebrities’ private jets won’t slow down one of the most avid plane-spotters.
“For me, it definitely makes me want to get more at it,” Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student who’s faced scrutiny for posting the paths of jets carrying such big names as Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, said in an interview.
The 1,000-plus page aviation policy legislation (
Jet Data Used by Taylor Swift Fans Gets New Shield in FAA Bill
Under the new law, the FAA within two years would create a process to allow private jets to remove their identities from public view upon request. It would also let them obtain a new international flight code. Sweeney says hobbyists like him will still be able to use signals to track aircraft locations and figure out whose plane is whose.
“It’s not stopping the actual tracking data, it’s just hiding who registered owns it,” said Sweeney, who started programming his tracking during the pandemic lockdowns. A Musk fan, he got started in tracking because he’s always had an aviation interest and his father works in the industry.
Safety, Privacy Concerns
Musk and Swift criticized social media accounts documenting their jets’ travel, arguing it’s unsafe. Swift in December threatened legal action against Sweeney. Groups that represent private and business aviation raised concerns about the privacy of the planes, and Congress responded. The FAA, in a statement to Bloomberg Government, pledged to comply with the requirements in the legislation.
But with plane signal information from thousands of private individuals, trackers are able to see where a newly hidden code pops up and tie it to an old code, Sweeney said. They also use flight patterns, news reports, photos and data from the Federal Communications Commission to narrow down each plane’s owner and figure out who owns it even when it is registered to a trust.
“Each plane is transmitting where it is almost like an AM or FM radio tower that has an identifier that’s linked that matches up with the tail number on the plane,” Sweeney said. Trackers use thousands of people receiving signals, he said. “You’re not using the FAA’s infrastructure.”
Existing FAA pathways allow aircraft operators to limit identifying data from external flight-tracking services: the Privacy ICAO aircraft address program and the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed Program. Trackers still can find planes using context clues. Sweeney says the attention on celebrity jets is a “consequence of who these people are” and warned that efforts to hide identity could be opposed by law enforcement.
How much more the government could do remains to be seen. It can take many years for new generations of plane technologies to become widespread, and stopping the signals could require a restructuring of the aviation communications system or encryption.
Meanwhile, the growth of artificial intelligence could make it easier for trackers, Sweeney said.
Finding the codes “can be a little bit time consuming,” he said. “But if you put AI or any of that to try and figure out the patterns, it most definitely could do a better job as long as you instructed it correctly.”