Taylor Swift Threatens Legal Action Against Owner of X Account that Tracks her Private Jet via ADS-B
Jack Sweeney is a student who operates various social media and websites dedicated to tracking the private jets of celebrities and notable persons. In the past he's drawn the ire of Elon Musk who banned his @ElonJet account in 2022 which used to provide live updates on the location of Elon Musk's private jet. These days he operates the @ElonJetNextDay account which tracks Elon's jet with a 24 hour delay on X, but continues to track the jet live on other platforms.
Recently the legal team for global superstar Taylor Swift threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney for running the various social media accounts that track her private jet including @SwiftJetNextDay on X with a 24 hour delay, or live on alternative platforms like Mastodon. Swift's legal team claim Sweeney's live tracking accounts pose an “imminent threat to the safety and wellbeing” of Swift.
Jack notes that he makes use of legal live ADS-B flight data from public data aggregators like Airplanes.live and AirFramesIO. ADS-B data is most commonly provided from contributors with RTL-SDR dongles running on Raspberry Pi single board computers.
The FCC does not prohibit the collection of unencrypted radio signals such as ADS-B and ACARS. This is done by thousands of feeders who give data to websites like @live_airplanes, TheAirTraffic, @AirframesIO, and ADSBexchange.
— Jack Sweeney (@Jxck_Sweeney) February 7, 2024
Even without Sweeney's social media accounts anyone can legally look up this live public flight data data, or even receive it themselves directly from the aircraft if they are close enough. Although a point can be argued that the social media accounts run by Sweeney make it significantly easier for this information to be obtained and shared by anyone.
Paired with ADS-B, ACARS provides some additional clarity, sometimes helping to identify previous and current ownerships due to miscodes in the different transmitting systems. Often it also sheds light on the status of systems in the airframe (useful for identifying what might have gone wrong for crashes, or understanding fuel consumption more accurately.
Learn more about the community effort and to setup a feeder station @ Airframes (https://airframes.io).
Looking at the US legal system recently it appears court cases are often decided based on who is involved in the case rather than the actual application of the law. Jack better watch out, just because he has the law on his side doesn’t mean he won’t be found guilty of something.
It was always my understanding that under the Communications Act of 1934 it is legal to receive these signals but not to divulge their contents. What’s changed?
That is true for private communications. But ADS-B is considered public communication as the entire purpose is for anyone to use the ADS-B information to enhance situation awareness of the airspace.
who actually calls twitter “x”. just call it twitter especially because elon is a joke
haha yeah space man bad space man bad lol xd xd xd