Taylor Swift threatens legal action against Florida student who tracks her jet | CNN Business

She's generally good at managing her public persona, except when it comes to her pollute more than a small city machine private jet addiction. When people show you who they really are, believe them.

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.

LOL 15 downvotes at time of this comment for you daring to say that she was wrong.

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.

https://planefinder.net/

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.

Don't worry, it's happening to you even if you're not super rich. And it's being sold.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of that info being presented in that way

I don’t listen to her music, I’d hardly call her my hero.

Weird, it’s almost like they have to to have any usefulness.

At all.

Im seeing ~300 up

I'm for private jets to be used for target practice

I'm for everyone having a private jet!

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!

Renting a jet is just as bad for the environment as owning one

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.

Oh, poor Billionaire that can afford 24 hr private security! /s

I don’t care. She has other options, anyway. She can’t have her cake and eat it, too.

Trains are cool. Maybe not private trains, but we all need to make sacrifices.

Several points:

• Lots of information is public, such as your address. That doesn't mean somebody explicitly publishing your address for the purpose of harassing you isn't committing an offence.

• Some celebrities can't fly on passenger planes for their own safety and even that of others or the proper functioning of infrastructure. Can you imagine Taylor Swift trying to fly on a public carrier? She would get mobbed at the very least. At worst she might be putting her health or even her life in danger. Especially now that the MAGA morons are attacking her.

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.

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.

But data brokers are doing this to all of us, all the time.

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.

I agree, I think you're being down voted by the people who cheered on the Elon musk tracking kid. Sure it might be legal but I think everyone can all agree they wouldn't want this done to themselves.

There are plenty of ways to get someplace that don't involve owning your own personal jet.

I don't care if she tours or not, but I know for a fact my favorite bands either rent a bus or fly commercial.

(Top: Taylor Swift's private jet -- or at least the same model, a Dassault Falcon 900. Bottom: JP Morgan's private Pullman railcar.)

Airships; When you want to be as fast as an ocean liner, as cheap as an airplane, and as subtle as a train.

Why did they go away?

??? Don't fly in a private jet then

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.

I feel you. Makes sense to me.

I wonder why someone hasn't started a Part 135 for celebrities that way they can't be tracked per se. Rent out planes instead of being owned by any one celebrity.

Nobody should own a private jet. If you have one, it gets tracked.

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.

If he stops it another person will start doing it, but anonymously

And i doubt Florida has an anti-slapp law.

They have 2: https://www.rcfp.org/anti-slapp-guide/florida/#:~:text=Florida's general anti-SLAPP provision,government%2C or to petition the

Fair enough, I could have phrased that better.

You mean commit suicide by three shots in the back of the head?

It's more than possible to cripple someone with legal bills

Ah, the ole Air Force One switcheroo.

Go the extra mile and have body doubles on each flight

Yeah that was what I was thinking. "Just get more jets dummy"

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.

The thousands of people making those records sell and shows happen:

There is no self made billionaire, a billion is an absurd amount of wealth a singular person cannot actually earn or be worth.

She wasn't actively exploiting the labor of workers in order to be rich

What a sad state of affairs that you feel the need to "defend" yourself by claiming you're not conservative. What the hell happened that we can't have differing opinions without making blanket disclaimers?

"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.

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.

Especially since she's definitely rich enough to offset her global foot print from her jet usage by actively donating to charities trying to protect the planet ten times and she wouldn't feel it one bit.

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.

Looks as if she grew up in a comfortably upper class family. Maybe not mega rich, but they had money, a giant house, and land, and seem to have been able to use money to get her seen in the right places.

Regardless, she clearly has talent far beyond simply coming from an affluent childhood.

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.

Crazy how she's rich enough to waste money on this without even realizing it while children are starving to death lol.