This is going to help bring down everyday prices, stop Genocide and will ensure another Epstein type billionaire who privately flies people to his pedophile island will receive swift Justice!
As much as I say fuck the billionaires, they have actually already had methods of doing this for about 50 years. Only the dumb billionaires who registered the planes in their name were annoyed about the rules. They could have always registered it under a trust, like almost every other rich person private jet out there. People can still figure out the plane tail registration and track you through that, and that will never change. So the billionaires that are happy about this regulation change still have their tail numbers known by the public to be associated with them and can still be tracked. Now they just have to change their tail numbers (giant pain) and wait for people to do slightly more difficult digging to figure out what plane is theirs.
I’m glad for people like you, because I’ve spent a good chunk of my life desperately wishing to be in that club, and then another chunk being sad that I wouldn’t be able to be. I was miserable and latched onto something that I believed would alleviate it, but I nowadays definitely think I’m happier not being in that club.
I’ve never really wanted to be in the private jet billionare club but I have always wanted to be in the “have a nice paid off house and enough money to safely start a small business” club. Sure, being a billionare would get me that but what would I do with the other 99.999% of the money?
I think I mostly just wanted to be in the "so rich I never have to think about money again. Growing up super poor left its marks on me and now even though I am relatively secure and comfortable, I still have a background anxiety about whether I’ll have enough.
There’s an instinct within me that screams that I shouldn’t share resources with other people unless I’m sure I have more than enough for myself. If I indulged that instinct, that would mean that in a situation where there’s enough for everyone, I’d feel most comfortable with 3 or more shares, because then even if I gave away one of my shares to someone else, I’d still have what I need, plus some buffer. There’s a reason I work very hard to not indulge that instinct though, because I don’t want to hoard at the expense of other people like me.
Like I say, it’s just part of a wish of not having to think about money at all. I had some very rich friends in uni, and sometimes they’d shop in places where the clothes didn’t have price tags, the kinds of places where if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it. I envied the fact that they didn’t have to think about money more than I did the material luxuries they could afford
You will still be able to track jets by their transponder. Planes are required to broadcast their location at all times.
What has changed is if there is a name attached to that transponder. This lets the owners of private planes have the FAA remove their name from the public record.
Yeah well figuring out who owns what jet will mearginally harder. Like with metadata if you have a few data points it will be easy to figure out who owns what plane. And it is not like these people don’t travel much so the data points will Stack up fast.
Its the Tragedy of the Commons. No single individual really has an incentive to stop flying, outside of the marginal impact on PR. So everyone just says its someone else’s problem.
The FAA is toothless. The EPA is toothless. The individual industry leaders are more legally beholden to shareholders than any regulatory body. Even in aggregate, the emission volume of flights pale beside the emissions caused by coal stacks and automotive emissions and bunker fuel from bulk cargo shipping, so its the billionaire equivalent of saying “At least I’m recycling” when pushed about what you’re doing to curb greenhouse gases.
At the end of the day, what we need is a comprehensive investment in high speed mass transit. But fossil fuel companies hate that. Aeronautics companies hate that. Politicians fixated on quarterly budget figures hate that. And the folks that would actually build rail in this country no longer exist.
So whatchagonna do? Shrug, blame “the system”, and go with the flow because everyone else is doing it.
I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don't like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.
Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?
Just because it's a plane, and just because it's a rich person, doesn't make it any less of a privacy violation.
So “privacy for me but not for thee”? Despite your feelings about the individuals involved (which are fair enough) you do see that’s exactly as bad as the “laws for thee but not for me” that we rail against? Balancing these rules is one of those thorny problems we have to address if we ever want things to get better for the majority, but just saying “you’re filthy rich so you don’t get privacy” isn’t the way. Neither is saying that they can hide completely.
Would you be ok with people tracking you in your car, or on public transport? At what level does that change for you? Is it just planes that should be publicly trackable, or boats too? What about limousines or jyst big cars?
Don’t get me wrong, I think people using any of those methods should be held accountable for the harm they’re causing, but that should apply all the way down too if that’s what we’re doing. Car drivers already pay tax on fuel and to register their vehicle so you could argue they’re already accountable, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough when you consider the harm tailpipe emissions do.
Large cars too? We’re starting to get into rather dystopian territory here. I don’t drive a large car, but I know I wouldn’t like to be tracked just because someone decided I was.
I’m not actually averse to saying the loss of anonymity is the penalty for using particularly polluting modes of transport, but we should frame the rules in those terms, rather than just making ownership records public.
Sorry, when you said ‘and everything above’ I thought you were referring to the things I’d listed above.
Reading it the other way, fair enough, you’re drawing the line for anonymous travel at private boats or planes. Personally I don’t think that’s helpful as they just end up chartering them from shell companies they own so their details aren’t attached to the flight so they can dodge scrutiny that way. You can try to investigate the companies but they’re anonymous that often all you can tell is they’re a charter firm a particular person uses a lot. That might be enough, but personally I’d rather either have proper accountability, or accept this isn’t the way to do it.
If they’d start doing that people would find new ways to follow them. I believe that rich people must be named and shamed for their wealth and I don’t really feel sorry when not everything goes their way. That topic would open a whole new can of worms though so let’s leave it at that I’d say.
Nevermind the billionaires, they’re just being used as scapegoats to distract you. You don’t beat an unfair and unjust system by creating a new unfair and unjust system, so the rules need to apply to everyone, no matter how annoying that feels, otherwise, you may find yourself or someone you care about in the out group and suffering because of it.
If we want privacy, everyone gets the same right. If we want free speech, everyone gets free speech (that’s the one that I find hardest to reconcile. If we want people to be able to protest or raise issues freely does that alao mean we must grant the same to those who spew hate and seek to twist the minds of others? How do we balance that?).
I don’t know what the ‘perfect’ system looks like, or even if there is such a thing. What we have now isn’t it, but saying ‘that group over there should have less rights than me’ isn’t the way either.
I hope I’m not whining. I am saying we should apply the same rules to, and ensure the same rights for, everybody though; not doing so is a large part of how we got here in the first place.
You or I can travel anonymously, or at least without our movements being tracked by the public. If we want to deny that to certain people, or to certain modes of transport, we should have a clear reason why and ensure that it’s effects are balanced with it’s benefits. As I mentioned in one of my comments above, if we want to hold people accountable when they use certain types of transport, that’s fine, and if removing their anonymity is the way we want to do it, that’s fine too, but we should apply it all the way down, from planes to cars.
They have the same protection as everyone else all the way up to chartering a flight. They lose privacy for the privilege of owning an entire jet. We also lose privacy for owning certain things, like home ownership is all public record.
But they are sad that their small-scale climate disaster flights are recorded, so they get their own law.
Home ownership is a good example of what I mean about making the rules apply to everyone, and it applies to all types of houses, from the smallest to rhe largest, the most efficient to the least. This is an equitable rule.
Applying the same logic to transportation would mean making all car and bike ownership records public too, which I don’t think it a great idea. As I mentioned before, if we want to make the loss of anonymity the penalty for owning a massively polluting vehicle we should apply it to all significantly polluting vehicles including planes, yachts, trucks and maybe even excessively large cars. The problem is where to draw the line.
As far as I can see, the current change just brings plane ownership in line with other vehicles, and so, even though I appreciate being able to track some of these people, without rules applying to other vehicle types, it seems fair to me.
I think most people on Lemmy would agree that private planes simply shouldn’t exist, at least on a personal use level. I don’t actually care at all where these rich bozos are going, but the ability to shame them for their method of travel outweighs any potential privacy concern. Airports are public places, airplanes (were) a matter of public record. If they truly want privacy, they should find an alternative means of conveyance. If they absolutely need to travel incognito, they could just charter a plane, for Pete’s sake.
I think people are more upset about the fact that basic laws protecting the privacy of millions are not even discussed but when a few billionaires cry that they can be tracked a law is enacted swift-ly (hehe) and public data that the government collects is no longer public.
Maybe they should focus on the greater good.
And while your privacy argument could be a good point, a plane has no privacy and just like other registers the public had a legitimate interest to know.
there is nothing from us keeping a database and tracking cars like this, It is just not required by law to do this with active updates. I mean with all the cameras in cars (and I am sure their are insurance companies that are looking into putting more AI cameras in cars to track not only your driving [progressive did a massive push on this already] but also those around you) you can just machine learn those plates and pool them in a public area where we can all pull and push info about these drivers. The airways we can still do this with, and we will, they will anon the info, but I am sure it will be an easy thing to overcome.
Nothing is anonymized for me, wanna know my house address, just look up the name on the internet, it will give you an idea and then just call the local county clerk, they will hand over any details about properties owned by me in that area. Its a matter of public record. My car has an ID on it that is required by law to be shown and not hidden until asked for by the government. Hell all your siblings and children, they are a matter of public record, so I can find out a LOT about you, just by knowing small info about you. (try it, look up an old partner on a search engine, they will give you known addresses for like 20 years.)
So please dont make this about, they wanna just be as private as you are. I dont have shell companies to hide all my properties onto. I dont get laws that state I can randomize my lic plate on my car. And also least we forget, the police can already have access to your cars real time data, the car companies are selling that info, so is your phone provider.
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