Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

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What if someone made a website listing all of everyone's travels, live - where everyone is at all times. It would be dystopian.

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.

There are tons of websites listing all commercial flights. If you don’t want to be tracked, you just need to travel like everyone else rather than on a private jet, the most wasteful form of travel.

If you're Swift famous, I'm not sure you're going to get onto a regular plane without a load of people tweeting about it.

But it's not everyone's travels. It's the travels of an airplane. Which are all public information.

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 mean, we DO track flights publicly using sites like FlightRadar. Taylor Swift just happens to own a plane and what people track is the plane, not her. If the plan flies without her, the trackers don't know. Not unless they augment that information with spotters that have a clear view of the boarding activity of the plane.

This could be a good argument, but we are specifically talking about flying private aircraft which is public info (and for good reason).

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?

Genuinely asking - what's the good reason why flying private aircraft is public info?

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.

If she flies her plane on the Moon (chortle), or some other place without any tracking infrastructure, her plane's location won't be available to anyone, either.

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.

> its location and identification needs to be known to everyone for safety reasons.

How do identification of the plane and/or of its owner contribute to safety?

The owner's not identified, the plane is, so that ATC (or, in the case of an incredibly unusual emergency, another plane) knows who to call.

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.

That's not true for many, many planes, and there are very many private planes that are not jets and the owners are not rich. Thousands and thousands are homebuilts.

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.

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