Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can now hide details of their private jets
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has created a system for private aircraft owners to request that their registration information — including their name and address — be kept private. That may impact celebrity private jet trackers, which have used FAA registration information to identify jets belonging to the likes of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
The new FAA system was mandated by the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which gave the organization two years to establish a procedure for aircraft owners and operators to request that any “personally identifiable information” be made private. The FAA says it’s also “evaluating” whether to go one step further and default to keeping such information private. The act became law in May 2024 under the Biden administration.
The change will likely make it more difficult to operate celebrity jet trackers, which use FAA registration information to identify private jets owned by celebrities so that their flightpaths can be tracked. Accounts monitoring jet use by Musk, Swift, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, and more have gone viral in the past, though have seen bans on platforms owned by Musk and Zuck. In 2023 Taylor Swift sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jack Sweeney, who operates a number of popular jet trackers.
