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Notes -
Some technical notes:
ADS-B Out is a newer signaling technique. Where conventional transponders provide data squawks with temporary identifiers in response to outside radar bursts, ADS-B Out constantly transmits with a relatively weak ISM-band transmission. The original intent and focus was anti-air-air-collision efforts, but it does also provide coverage where radar ground stations are impractical or ineffective, and does help for flight safety on cross-countries where people don't set up flight-following correctly. Among other things, it transmits aircraft identifier (usually tail-number), model, GPS location, (pressure!) altitude, and speed/vector. It was mandated (with some exceptions not relevant here) starting January 2020, which was an absolute mad scramble for general aviation.
((A few other countries use different approaches: I know Australians have a weird cell phone setup. But for US/EU/Canada, it's the standard.))
Because the transmission is weak, it's fairly short-range, but easy to set up a private ground station. I've gotten ~40 miles in clear weather with a big directional antenna from a PiAware, but in practice expect closer to 10-20 miles. Professional ground stations are on a lot of cell phone towers and are rumored to sometimes get 80-120 miles (marketed for 250), though I dunno how much of that actually happens.
But there's a lot of agglomeration schema out there. FlightAware is the fancy user-friendly one, but FlightAware also allows people to delist their aircraft from the service (for a fee!). Others do not: ADS-B Exchange is the one being referenced here at length, and afaik doesn't remove flight records periods. It is an absolute pain to use the historical search tool, though.
In theory, you can talk with the FAA and join the Privacy ICAO Address program, which gives out a unique non-N-number ID you can use once a month. In practice, the program doesn't work: it requires physical modifications that are a pain, adds a lot of hassle with ATC at irregular intervals, complicates international flight (since it's a US-only program), and doesn't actually obscure the aircraft identifier if it's anything more unusual than a Cessna 152 (since it's not that hard to look for the closest aircraft model of the same type at a given airport).
So this is 'public' information, but it's public information in a really weird sense.
Bellingcat Discord claims to have found the location of the video Musk tweeted. I don't think these are strong ground markers, but I'm not going to bet my reputation against the sort of internet auties that do a lot of this OSI work. On the other hand, it's not hard to mix their claims and the ADS-B records from that night and make a pretty straightforward story (not accurate, but I'm not making it more accurate, and I'm not going to explain why it's slightly wrong), and the part where they don't seem to be doing so publicly suggests that they either don't have a good understanding of the logistics of private aviation, or they're not really interested in it.
This is exactly what Elon Musk did, however Jack Sweeney explicitly worked around it.
Yes, although it's not clear whether Musk's jet was using an ICAO Address at this time, or even in the last few months. ADS-B Exchange is listing the flights under its normal tail number, and while that could reflect individual reporters or ADS-B Exchange itself doing an automatic translation, the default software package doesn't, and that covers a really wide geographic range including international flights where it would be impractical (impossible?) to use PIA.
Now, even if he stopped using PIA, it's quite likely that's at least in part because of people like Sweeney puncturing the veil of privacy.
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You know... I'm surprised by all this, and also not.
I currently work around the FAA LAANC program. And among the edicts to come down to LAANC providers over the last few years is an ever growing emphasis on protecting PII specifically, but data generally. Basically, nobody should ever be able to tell, through you, or the FAA, when any specific person flew a drone. You aren't supposed to keep data forever, users are supposed to be able to purge all their data, providers aren't supposed to share data, it's a whole thing. Privacy is a high concern, probably second only to safety.
So on the one hand, I'm shocked that the FAA is so absolutely shit at private flight data. On the other I'm not, because it's such a legacy application with decades of industry built up around the expectation that the data is public.
Yeah, I'd expect the FAA to be one of the last organizations to lead the charge for data privacy in the modern age, not out of any initiative against it, but simply because it's so peripheral to their job.
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Musk's stated motivation for the bans claims that they all posted (or posted links to) ADS-B records, and that Musk had a significant change of heart on the matter after the car his toddler was in was tailed by an activist. I don't think it's a good policy for a few reasons, but understanding how these things work explains a lot of the details of the policy change.
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