- Jet-tracking wunderkind Jack Sweeney ruffled feathers after tracking celebrity private planes on social media.
- People can use public data from websites like ADS-B Exchange and LiveATC to locate personal aircraft.
- Ultra-rich jet owners like Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, and Tim Cook have made moves to dodge the trackers.
Computer whiz Jack Sweeney made headlines in early 2022 when Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered him $5,000 to delete the viral jet tracking Twitter account @ElonJet, which followed the live whereabouts of Musk's Gulfstream G650ER private plane.
Sweeney also publicly tracked the personal jets of celebrities like Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Considering Musk has been extremely vocal about his distaste for Sweeney's jet-tracking habits, it didn't come as a surprise when he quickly banned the college student's over 30 accounts after buying Twitter in October 2022.
However, despite heated online debates, jet tracking is not illegal.
And, the world's billionaires — many of whom recently flew into a tiny Idaho city for their annual "summer camp" — are going to great lengths to hide their private flights.
Its easier to hide on a chartered business plane
In October 2022, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton CEO Bernard Arnault sold his Bombardier $75 million Global 7500 private plane in favor of charter flights.
"Indeed, with all these stories, the group had a plane and we sold it," Arnault said, according to a Bloomberg translation. "The result now is that no one can see where I go because I rent planes when I use private planes."
Apple CEO Tim Cook made a similar move in 2017 when he stopped flying on company corporate aircraft.
However, not every billionaire wants to part with their fancy private jet or has the ability to ban people like Sweeney from social media, so some have turned to the federal government for help.
The FAA can make tracking more difficult, but it's not foolproof
Myriad celebrities like Travis Scott, Jay-Z, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah participate in a free federal program called "Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed," or LADD. Basically, this allows private aircraft owners to request the Federal Aviation Administration redact their tail number from public tracking.
This means companies that use federal data to track commercial and general aviation flights, like FlightAware and FlightRadar24, will not display LADD-identified planes.
The ultra-rich can go one step further and completely shadow their tail numbers thanks to a second federal program called the privacy ICAO aircraft address, or PIA — over 300 of which have been registered to date.
However, there is a workaround for both. Trackers can use an aircraft system called ADS-B, which broadcasts information like GPS location, altitude, and speed from one aircraft to ground stations and other planes.
Using this system, volunteers from around the world have set up radios that transfer flight data to a free public website called ADS-B Exchange. The website collects the data and displays the locations of planes all around the world — even LADD and PIA — and was the website that powered Sweeney's Twitter accounts.
"These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," the FAA told Insider in October 2022.
The agency further said the protections are not a "silver bullet," noting people can still locate incognito private jets using LiveATC, a Freedom of Information Act request, and frequently departed airports.
While ADS-B Exchange was the main data provider for Sweeney, the website was recently sold and the jet-tracking wunderkind now uses other sources — including the one he built himself. He has also started @ElonJetNextDay, which, in line with Twitter's updated policy, posts the hidden flights on a 24-hour delay.
And, to make it even harder for billionaires to kick him off the internet, Sweeney has also moved to other platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and even Zuckerberg's newly launched Twitter alternate Threads.
