[islewis]

The motivation for these accounts is usually a rift on the "ultra-wealth is bad" train.

Setting aside any possible agreements/disagreements with that, the flight tracking information is freely public, available to anyone who wants to look- go on flightaware. Flight information has never been private, nobody treats it as private, so why would social media* companies pretend it is? I don't think home addresses are that comparable in this situation.

EDIT: company name

[627467]

Is the ownership information as public? Possibly it is, but the implication that specific people are on a given flight seems NOT public information. Or maybe the problem here is that these ultra wealthy people are wealthy enough to one a couple of planes but not enough to own so many that it would be hard to tell if they are flying at all.

I don't know. To me this feels the equivalent of having paparazzo permanently on your tail. I know, it's just a ultrarich person, they don't need our defending. Just feels like like a overkill method of accountability to make a tail visible and available for all to see all the time

[ryandrake]

The below applies to the USA:

Aircraft are (in general) required to transmit ADS-B information in the clear over RF that contains information identifying the aircraft.

Aircraft registrations are public. You can go to the FAA[1] and look up who owns what airplane and what their address is. Some aircraft owners choose to obfuscate their ownership through shell companies or LLCs.

Passenger manifests are collected by the FAA for airlines and charter flights, but they are not made available to the public.

So you can know who owns the plane that's flying over your antenna, but not who's on it.

1: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...