[petertodd]

> The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose.

There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy. Obviously, this FAA list is part of that. But there's probably even better tech that could achieve this too.

I'm not an aviation expert so I'll leave the details to those people. But we should be trying to find ways to improve the privacy of this system.

Give it time and people will try to justify real time tracking of all car traffic for "safety" reasons too...

[mitchellh]

> There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy.

Probably, but the FAA and aviation in general leans towards "use the dumbest, most reliable technology possible" (for good reason, this isn't a dig at that). A relatively cheap wing-attachable beacon that beep boops on a frequency with no handshakes, encryption, etc. is one of the simplest possible thing.

Look at the fact that piston engines in aircraft still use magnetos and manual mixture controls. :) There's a ton of literature on that, we've had real world examples of more reliable alternatives, and yet... Luckily magento replacements such as SureFly are making some headway (after long, long long last). But they're a tiny tiny part of aviation today.

[petertodd]

Yes. A good example is the continued use of AM modulation for aviation radio. While bandwidth inefficient, the failure modes of AM modulation are easy to understand and predictable, which is good for safety.

But, even then, there may still be something clever that can be done to improve privacy without something as heavy-weight as, say, encryption. We should be open to the possibility.

[jolmg]

I'm not into aviation, but if this is about planes broadcasting their position publicly, I would imagine it's beneficial not just for the traffic control towers, but also for other pilots flying around in the area that can receive those signals, in case they're ever not within range of a working tower. It works as a redundancy option, for safety.

It also works in case there's unlicensed, radio-silent flyers, which is bad, but you turn a bad situation worse if they can't get info on what other aircraft they might bump into.

The unencrypted broadcasting of their position is like a trailer beeping as they're backing up. It's an alert for others to pay attention to them and stay out of their way.

[sigwinch]

At the bottom of the article, it’s noted that lawmakers very recently removed the ability to determine the owner of a tail number.

[petertodd]

Thanks! That's a good step.