Taylor Swift threatens legal action against Florida student who tracks her jet | CNN Business
Taylor Swift threatens legal action against Florida student who tracks her jet | CNN Business
Alright you’ve been on a roll lately Swifty, but imma call you out; transponders are public information.
Yeah, she's generally a decent person, but she's just in the wrong here.
Admittedly I don't know much about her as a person, but how can someone who uses a private jet in 2024 be considered a decent person by any stretch?
Having such a ludicrously unsustainable lifestyle in a climate emergency that will kill millions and displace hundreds of millions in just a few decades is a crime against humanity, change my mind.
Its a bit more complicated than that.
Traffic cameras are usually publicly accessible. You are also, generally, allowed to take pictures of people when they are in public spaces where there is not an expectation of privacy.
So at what point of this is the line crossed?
That is where this gets pretty murky. Because we all more or less acknowledge that parparazzi taking pictures of everyone leaving an airport are assholes (unless it is about figuring out if The Rock is going to come do PR to distract people from the WWE sexual slavery scandal...). But we have no issue with knowing that without even needing to send someone over to see who got off the 1235 LAX->DFW flight.
And while my initial stance is "fuck the super-rich": I am allegedly part of a private chat for "people in tech" to give each other a heads up if we see a CEO getting off a flight. Because if your boss is pretty regularly visiting Facebook HQ and not telling anyone? That is the sign that you need to refresh your CV because you might get layed off after an acquisition/merger. There are definitely business reasons for not making it trivial to track individuals.
So yeah. I am going to side on the stance of "if you need to travel secretly, wear sunglasses like the rest of us". Or, if you are too famous to even risk that, at least use one of the private jet companies rather than owning your own. But I also think this is something that we need to actually consider from a legal and privacy standpoint and it is a lot more complex than that.
That's fair, but that's a discussion about how accessible the info should be. If it's public, it's public, and the public has equal access to it. If it shouldn't be that easy to access, we fix the system, not punish the users. And suing is punishment/aggression, regardless of the outcome. Self defense isn't free.
I don't think your analogy works, because, as long as you know the plane's identifier, you can just type it into a website and see where it is.
That's all you have to do.
How do you get that identifier for Taylor Swift's plane? That part I don't know and maybe that part is where her case lies, but I have a feeling she has no case or Musk would have tried the same thing.
I feel like your example is way more granular than what is going on here. It’s more like ‘so and so has arrived at this city airport now’ and within an hour or two they could be anywhere in a fairly large radius without anyone reporting their location. Also there is the fact that this is ‘punching up’ which is often seen as ok.
I don’t pretend to have an answer here, but it’s hard to feel sorry for celebrities.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of that info being presented in that way
If you are for Musk being tracked, you should be fine with her being tracked the same way.
I'm for anyone in a private jet being tracked.
Aren't all jets tracked?
Every civilian aircraft is required by air traffic regulations to broadcast it's flight path and identifier.
So once a plane registration is publicly known to be owned by someone they can of course be tracked. Of course it doesn't mean that the owner is on the plane, but it certainly let's you gather how much they fly around. Turns out that Taylor's jet is used a lot even for private jets, which obviously doesn't make her look good from an environmental point of view. Now she tries to use her wealth to silence people tracking this and pointing it out to the public. Shame on her!
Woman who made over a billion being a public figure upset she is now a public figure.
Sorry, no privacy for private jets. I don’t care about the “danger.” She can fly commercial in business class or first class if she wants privacy.
Her Grammy speech was literally "I love doing this, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do what I love."
removed, if you don't want people to track you then fly first class.
They can charter jets and travel in greater luxury without having a tail number assigned to them personally. When I become a multibillionaire I will charter jets.
My step father is a private plane pilot.He owns the plane and rich people pay him to fly them places.
You're right, rich people like Swift don't need to own a jet themselves. It's very easy to find jets to charter and likely cheaper because you're not paying to maintain a plane.
So she can stop complaining about her silver spoon not being polished enough.
taylor swift publicly has a tour schedule that anyone with internet access can get. and I'm sure that these places have airports. and flight logs are public. it's not hard to figure out what plane left from the city she was in is going to her next tour date.
if she, the most famous and richest white woman on the planet doesn't want her movements tracked her movements would not be tracked.
I'm on team Florida student.
Same.
Track them all. Elon. Other Billionaires. Government using our taxes for private planes.
Didn't the richest person in the world try to do this exact same thing? I'm still convinced it's the reason he bought Twitter. Those flight logs are public information because they prevent mid air collisions, your not going to change that. No one is going to be putting military grade radar equipment on a Boeing 757 if they can't even stop the doors from opening mid flight.
Those flight logs are public information because they prevent mid air collisions, your not going to change that.
One way to prevent being personally identified is to not fly around in your own personal jet and use one of the many other available options that aren't trackable this way.
Several points:
I find Taylor Swift bland as beige, I don't get the appeal at all, and I think Musk is a rabid twatwaffle. I also don't believe anyone should really get to be so wealthy. Still, there are good reasons why one might need to travel by private means without their movements being broadcast.
Musk is an idiot but that's not why he bought Twitter, especially when he balked at the idea of paying $10k instead of his offered $5k to do the same thing.
No, Musk bought twitter for a much, much more stupid reason.
You're* not going to change that.
But flight data is available - this guy just labels her N number and filters the data in a creepy way. I get that it's probably causing her danger to have stalkers waiting at the destination for her - but those stalkers always had access to this flight data.
Seems like a workaround for Taylor would be to not own a plane and charter a different one every time. (Or do something actually environmentally minded :/)
How is it creepy? It’s activism.
This person is a hell of a lot more useful to the world than some billionaire piece of shit.
Just because it's done to a woman it's suddenly "creepy". Don't think anyone ever called that guy creepy when it was done to Elon.
As an activist tool, a simple 'miles flown' counter would do it without the 'creepy' facet of knowing her general whereabouts at all times.
Of course, as a more mundane person without a private plane or cash to fly much, anyone who cares to know what airport I'm closest to just knows the answer is almost always the one nearest my home city... So in a sense I have no more privacy than Swift, since this only lets you know what airport she last left from and presumably is closest to, which is vague enough to describe 99% of my time just by sitting still.
I guess a workaround for the guy posting the data (if he is forced to stop) would be to instead just post the distance traveled and CO2 emissions for every flight. That’s still shaming her for being an environmental asshole while avoiding issues with stalkers or whatever their defense is.
.
If it's not safe for people to use publicly available information then it shouldn't be publicly available. No one was worried about it when it was used to call Musk out. Or the 1000s of people dealing with stalkers that aren't famous enough for anyone to give a fuck about. Either protect everyone or don't. You can't just single out the rich white girls.
The federal government will take publicly available information and if it is bundled up with enough other information it is still considered classified and you can still (if you hold any sort of clearance) be in trouble for sharing that classified bundle.
Which is just to say there is legal precedent agreeing with your point, although AFAIK that responsibility only applies to folks who have already agreed to responsibly handle confidential information.
If someone drove around and picked up everyone who has explicitly said they’d like to rape or kill her, and dropped them off at her doorstep with knives and guns, I hope we’d all agree that’s pretty fucked up and shouldn’t be condoned.
We have legal ramifications for that already. That's being an accomplice in the commission of attempted murder. And the rest of your comment is mostly the exact same thing, we have laws for when we cross a particular line.
The thing is the publishing flight information on a social media site isn't technically crossing a line. Now I'll tell everyone here the same thing I said with Musk's whole thing. As citizens, we have to lobby for any of those lines to be redrawn. That's the same thing here. Should we place that line elsewhere? Maybe, maybe not. But that's for us to dictate.
But as it stands, we can extrapolate all kinds of bad things that could come to pass and a lot of those are very illegal. But at the moment, what the person is doing is distinctly not illegal. Should it be? Maybe. But it is currently not. Can it lead to bad things? Yes. That's kind of with anything in terms of public information.
The balance that is traditionally struck, is a balance between the public's need to know and an individual's right to privacy. There's not hard and fast rules on where we put the line on that and finding the right spot today for that line, doesn't mean that it's the right spot for it tomorrow. Society changes and sometimes our laws must change with it. Sometimes it shouldn't change. But that's for us the Citizens to direct.
In the age of worldwide social media
And I'm just going to say this is with a LOT of things. At the moment our laws woefully handle social media because it's just so new and law takes so long to catch up. But that's what I was getting at with Elon Tracker back in the day. Musk can go to the Government to ask for laws to be updated, not get petty and ban folks off his social media site. Now Musk has every right to ban who he deems fit to be banned. It is absolutely his ship to wreck here. But it was pretty petty when Musk could have channeled a lot of that energy into getting new laws enacted and we could have avoided this whole thing with Swift. And Swift seems to be mulling litigation rather than actually reforming laws, which means this will inevitably happen again and again and again.
The solution is to get our laws up to speed with our society. And thus far from Musk and Swift there's been every indication that people with the means to actually get a face-to-face with members of select committees in the House and Senate, are opting to take the whole thing personally than an opportunity to do good for the Nation at large. That's my issue with the Rich on this. All of these folks thus far have taken these things personally, and rightly so because crazy people hunting you down can absolutely trigger that self preservation instinct, but there's also a chance for them to look past how this affects just them. But we have yet to see any move in that direction without it being like Musk in the first bits of it before he banned Elon Tracker, calling for the FAA to just be completely done away with. That's clearly not a solution that the public at large should be okay with. So for Musk, there's likely a middle ground he could reach between where we are and a complete dismantling of Government regulations.
And for the public discourse on this, that's my issue because it seems that public discussion on the matters related to this, start veering off into maximums and ignoring any kind of slight changes in current regulatory power. It starts becoming discussions of "oh my god so and so could be killed and here's a what if indicating the path one COULD take to cause harm." And yeah, those are interesting to say the least thought experiments, but they are not addressing the issue of widely disseminating that information. Something that could be resolved with new rules indicating that FAA transponder information and matchup databases operate under a limited distribution model. So one can reproduce the data for personal consumption, but cannot reproduce the data wide consumption. Much like the same way the NFL (because we're talking Swift here so apt entity to pull in) says you can have a Super Bowl party but you cannot have a projector for your entire neighborhood. There's a middle somewhere and I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers, but just running the extremes doesn't talk about that middle. That's my issue with the Public on this.
"We want the artist to perform near us, all of us,but we don't want them to be on planes in a way that makes that possible."
The solution is obvious.
Stop owning private jets.
Billionaires threatening, harassing, and intimidating normal people with their army of lawyers and sycophant fans is never okay.
Fuck Taylor Swift and every other rich piece of shit.
Fuck billionaires
Her lawyers must be crazy to think they can get anything done that elon couldn't. Taylor should be mad at her PR for not stopping her if she asked for this personally.
As for private jets. People with wealth, use that wealth to find an alternative. God knows you haven't found anything else to do with it.
Edit: Also, please let it be zeppelin technology.
They could invest in whole new rail lines with their own private cars and fill the other cars with low cost seats. Tons of people on it and no way reasonable way of tracking them because so many people boarding it each time.
(Top: Taylor Swift's private jet -- or at least the same model, a Dassault Falcon 900. Bottom: JP Morgan's private Pullman railcar.)
Dude dirigibles are STUPID EFFICIENT because they don't have to fly. They just float so you only need some tiny little fans to move them in the direction you like. I really do wish they'd come back
Way to kill the goodwill you've been gaining Taylor
Ehh, she is still human. She is one of the most recognizable and sought after a celebrities we've seen in a very long time. It must be absolutely horrible to be 24/7 in the public eye. But you can't fight it and she hasn't learned that yet. Try not to blame her, just be glad we got a level of goodwill that you don't find in most celebrities, and hope that it continues.
No one is forcing her to fly around that much. And she's by no means a new up and coming celebrity but has been dealing with this since 2 decades now.
So no, she doesn't get a free pass to use her wealth to silence very deserved criticism of her disgusting global footprint! Heck, she could spend a tiny amount of her dragon hoard sized wealth to donate to environmental protection to offset this footprint. But no, she rather uses that money to sue someone who she knows doesn't have the wealth to fight her legally.
Only half the country is inundated and riled up to see her as an Enemy of the State and an Enemy of the people. There must be many thousands now who want to see her raped, tortured and killed. She's been vilified. And she's not really a political figure unlike Musk who controls a significant part of the worlds communication medium and is politically active.
Taylor Swift has enough money to protect herself, but imagine someone less wealthy would be similarly tracked and/or vilified.
They're not tracking her you barely sentient punching bag, they are tracking the plane which is kind of necessary for safety.
someone less wealthy would be similarly tracked
I'm sympathetic to the perspective, but actually no, someone less wealthy couldn't be similarly tracked. To be tracked in this specific way, you must have exclusive ownership of plane(s) with tail numbers.
If you fly commercial and don't publish your itenirary publicly, then the public won't know your association with the flight. If you charter a private flight, then again no one knows that chartered plane == you. You have to actually own a dedicated private plane for anyone to use these resources to confidently track you in particular.
So I'm broadly sympathetic to the plight of celebrities with respect to paparazzi and stalkers and such. But with the availability of charter flights, hard for me to be too sympathetic of someone afflicted by private plane tracking.
Just a small clarification: the GOP does not have half of the country. Not even half of the voting population.
nope. sorry taylor. if your plane's tracking information is public knowledge it's allowed. if it's good for elon it's good for you too.
You figure she's savvy enough to know about the Streisand Effect. I guess not.
If you travel in the same plane all the time, and you own that plane, people will be able to track you. Why not just get a good contract with a private jet company so you can fly anonymously? Even if she wins this case, she will still be trackable until she takes advantage of any of the options she has at her disposal.
Or buy two more private jets and always have two fly randomly across the country while noone knows which one you're using
Checkmate
Ah, the ole Air Force One switcheroo.
Yeah that was what I was thinking. "Just get more jets dummy"
Go the extra mile and have body doubles on each flight
Heck she could spend a tiny amount of her dragon hoard sized wealth to offset the environmental impact of her air travel. For example by buying endangered rain forest land and donating it to a public charity. But no, she rather uses her wealth as a legal club to try to silence people pointing out the harm she does to the planet.
To be fair, she could do that put people would still fixate on the private flight usage.
No, obfuscating her travel in charters is the viable 'solution' to this problem. Still roughly equivalent environmental impact (actually, potentially a bit more since a charter company might have to do extra empty flights for repositioning), but her travel would be harder to discern.
I'm thinking since the super bowl drama she's probably getting more death threats than usual, and this is a reaction to that. It's not going to work. You cant sue someone for publishing publicly available information.
You can sue someone for anything. If it will be successful or not is another matter.
Essentially she is trying to SLAPP him (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Lawyers are not free in civil cases. She is just making it expensive for him if he wants to defend himself. And i doubt Florida has an anti-slapp law.
If he stops it another person will start doing it, but anonymously
And i doubt Florida has an anti-slapp law.
Fair enough, I could have phrased that better.
Maybe not the best idea to pattern yourself after Musk.
Put simply, there are no "good billionaires".
The irony of "all billionaires bad" is that Taylor Swift earned that money through album sales and live touring. She wasn't actively exploiting the labor of workers in order to be rich, she is just that popular.
And before everyone jumps down my ass about my opinion sounding too conservative for Lemmy, I invite you to check out my post history.
She wasn't actively exploiting the labor of workers in order to be rich
If this one action makes her a bad person, then there are no good people, which then of course would mean there are no good billionaires.
"that one action" lol
She is basically the worst case of private jet usage and leading the list of such individuals, while somehow advocating for the environment.
This is just ridiculous.
And she is trying to fuck that guy up for "stalking" and "harassment", just for showing public data.
On top, for whatever reason, she had 2 private jets flying around until now. Seems like she sold one this month.
It’s public information. If you have a problem then stop flying around in your fancy fucking jet.
God damn rich people. Fuck em all.
Looks like someone doesn't know how transponders work.
Understandable I guess: It's not really something most people know anything about, but you'd think someone working for her would've been like, "Yeah, no, that's not really how aviation works, they are public by design" before it got to the point where a legal threat was made.
They know how it works, but they also know the average person won't go against a billionaire and the army of lawyers they can afford. It's a scare tactic.
Yeah, that seems pretty probable, especially for someone with such a manicured public persona. Still though, they don't really have a legal leg to stand on no matter how many lawyers they throw at it.
Yeah, but if the cat is out of the bag with respect to her tail number, then it's just some rando typing in a random tail number in a flight tracking database. You don't have to be setting up a dedicated service to do this, just using publicly available stuff that would let you track a random delta flight just as easily as some celebs private plane.
Unless you start declaring the public tracking databases must honor requests to filter 'special' tail numbers from queries.
What a friendly billionaire.
I'm expecting her to be revealed as a villain at some point. She was born with a silver spoon, there are skeletons in closets, and she knows it. Time will tell.
Threatening legal action against some kid because she is too much of a rich asshole to travel like a normal person. If being a billionaire wasn't it then this is should be the reveal.
She is a billionaire, isn't that enough villainy?
I don't know anything about her. Was she born wealthy? That could explain a lot of the success.
According to wikipedia:
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989,[1] in West Reading, Pennsylvania.[2] She is named after singer-songwriter James Taylor.[3] Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch[4] and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), is a former homemaker who previously worked as a mutual fund marketing executive.[5] Taylor has a younger brother, actor Austin Swift.[6]
Not an emerald mine, but at least upper middle class.
She was. She basically bought her way into the music industry. In her early years, a lot of her hype was manufactured and astroturfed. Notably she did write her early songs herself, (the vast majority of pop songs are ghostwritten,) but didn’t have enough appeal to actually break into the industry. So her rich parents basically bought her a record label contract.
She has managed to turn the original millions into over a billion. So that is absolutely notable. But she wasn’t born poor, and it’s not a rags-to-riches story. Even without music, she never would’ve had to worry about rent or groceries.
Well to do with parents who were shockingly willing to bend over backwards to give her a chance at success. She's still remarkably wealthy given where she started but it's no rags to riches story.
I kinda hope so. It'd be pretty boring if it turns out she's just a mostly milquetoast white girl from Pennsylvania with a penchant for writing pop songs who stumbled into a billion dollars...
ADS-B data is public. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. I grew to respect her recently, but in this matter, she is full of shit.
Doubtful she is the one filing the lawsuit and may not even know about it.. Her dad/manager is really protective and likely initiated.
If you don't want people to know where your going just throw on a medical mask and buy a Greyhound ticket in cash like every other undercover federal agent
/s
Where you're* going.
Sure Ms. Swift, act like Muskrat.
Looking forward to her new, highly-relatable single, "Why you gotta track my jet?"
Link to his accounts:
If she had simply not said anything, no one would be talking about it
Way to go, Barb!
She's not doing anything, her team is. She probably isn't even aware of it.
Crazy how she's rich enough to waste money on this without even realizing it while children are starving to death lol.
Elon Part II
Elon Swift
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the Elon.
She could take a train.
she can get a very cool, private train!
Well, if trains existed.
Stop using the jet and this won't be an issue lol
Is everyone else sick of hearing about T Swift? I don't have anything against her, just don't want to see or hear her any more.
Filter out her name. I filter out certain keywords, like musk, tesla and kanye.
Something something Steisand effect...
Publicity implosion speedrun (any%)
If you think her fans will care, you are very wrong. I'm sure the vast majority of her fans want that Florida student to stop "harassing" and "stalking" her.
Same with Elon Musk's fans, but he's definitely gone downhill among non-fans. Not just from that, but it was one piece of the puzzle.
Her fans will always be her fans. But she was gaining momentum and just like that, it put it to a stop. I was sort of sympathizing with her up until this piece of news came out. Back to cynicism.
I disagree with the use of "Florida Student" when "Florida Man" would have been a better title
lol it looks as if her hands are chopped off
Are you saying... TAYLOR SWIFT'S ARMS AREN'T REAL??!
How Can Gloves Be Real If Our Arms Aren't Real
Venus de Swift
Power corrupts.
Nay nay TayTay. I support her, but she lost the plot on that one.
Precedent states that the only legal remedy is to buy whatever social media platform the dependent uses, ban them, and run the rest of the site into the ground.
it's literally delayed by 24 hours so that it's not a security risk for her. The only reason they're sharing it is to raise awareness about insane fuel consumption for example when she flies from one side of St. Louis to the other (and back), burning hundreds of gallons of jet fuel for what should have been a 30 minute drive
Couldn't he dodge this by publishing the data on a delay? Say, new flight info only shows up on the website 72 hours after it happened?
It's just publicly-available flight data. Anyone can get this information, there's nothing hidden or secret here.
Didn't she go on the record saying she doesn't own her jet and it gets leased out to other people? Ya know because pollution...
She does own the jet, but charters it out for most of the flights. Because when you own a jet but only fly two or three times a week, your crew needs something to do for the other two or three workdays each week.
Swallowed the hook
I'm just posting sources to back up my claims while everyone else just says stuff because they want it to be true. No need for sources when you can just say stuff... it's like Republicans.
Didn’t she just have an issue with a stalker that was arrested?
ITT: People who suddenly always hated Taylor Swift and were just waiting to hear who to point their torches and pitchforks at this round.
Uh oh, fall from grace?
lmao, this teen is a legend
White feminist privilege detected.
Seems like generic billionaire privilege to me
It's the same thing.
This is actually an interesting debate because it actually puts into question at what level people should be allowed to track other people. We would not want the government to follow us around, but a private citizen knowing where we are is kind of like stalking and could endanger them.
They aren’t tracking her. They are tracking her plane. Planes need to be tracked and the info should be public.
Especially now with newspapers reporting that Taylor Swift is seen as a 'danger to Republican norms' (per USA TODAY copy, Feb 2 - 4), this is an especially dangerous position to put her in. Republicans are starting to claim she is swaying the country away from their "values" (whatever those might be) and they are looking at her as an enemy of our country.
So the person doing this might have innocent motives, but it could lead to horribly disastrous results, and he could also be jailed for doing this. So I'm glad she's taking some legal action up front if only to protect herself and show that she is unwilling to be made a victim of other people's nutjob bigotry.
he could also be jailed for doing this
My fucking ass lmao. It's public information being posted on a public forum with no call to action whatsoever.
Her planes transponder is public information.
We may have reached peak Taylor now that she is making a show of dating that football player. She intrigued me for a while but now I mostly cringe.
Yeah I don't really know anything about her except her music isn't really my thing. I recently gave it another shot but every song felt kinda ragey and judgey in an unexpected way. It falls in this "quite literal but somehow unclear and never abstract" style of songwriting that to me is.. yeah, cringey.