Taylor Swift Has Successfully Made Tracking Her Private Jet Impossible

Taylor Swift has received numerous complaints about her frequent air travel, owing in large part to Sweeney’s flight monitoring efforts. Sweeney recently assembled a video of Swift’s 2023 plane travels, which looked to show that the pop star flew 178,000 miles last year, or approximately seven journeys around the Earth. Sweeney claims her jets emitted 1,200 tons of CO2, which is 83 times more than the typical American. Swift’s lawyer served Sweeney with a cease-and-desist order in February.

Celebrities and billionaires have long complained that it’s far too easy for random individuals on the internet to see how much gasoline exhaust they emit when they fly over the skies in their private jets. Well, it appears that our government’s politicians have heard these complaints and, unlike the rest of us, have taken action.

An addition to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill approved last week will allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information. President Joe Biden signed the FAA measure into law on May 16th, after it passed 88-4 in the Senate and 387-26 in the House.

Jet tracking has been available up to this point because private jet owners were required to register their aircraft ownership information with the FAA civil registration. Until today, that registration was available to the public, allowing those data points to be paired with open radar mapping to determine where and when certain planes flew. This public information has allowed online aficionados to track the jet activity of America’s top 1%.

It was alleged that the new FAA reauthorization bill, filed last June, will practically make it impossible (or, at the very least, extremely difficult) to trace the jet activity of the wealthy. The law will allow private aircraft owners to request that the government conceal personally identifiable information about their planes. That’s unfortunate, since in this day and age, knowing which members of America’s affluent class are spewing jet fuel into the atmosphere has proven useful.

It’s not like America’s wealthy and famous haven’t been begging for this to happen. Elon Musk reportedly threatened to sue Jack Sweeney, an undergraduate at the University of Florida, after he created a Twitter account that monitored the billionaire’s private jet activity, ElonJet, in 2020.