How is it legal to track private planes like Elon Musk's?
How is it legal to track someone's private jet? It's a question that has emerged in light of Twitter's decision to ban accounts that tracked private planes, including one — @ElonJet — that reported the flight activity of its own CEO, Elon Musk. The owner of the @ElonJet account, Jack Sweeney, has previously said that all the information he used to create the account is publicly available. Sweeney didn't respond to a request for additional comment. Although the data used to operate the @ElonJet account and other similar accounts tracking celebrity planes is publicly accessible, experts note there isn't a single government registry of such data. Instead, it actually requires putting together separate pieces of information to create tracking accounts. Doing so, of course, raises privacy concerns. The tracking capabilities are possible thanks to a technology called Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B). It's like global positioning system technolo...