Since military planes use this same public good, is their flight data also published?

In general yes, for example https://www.flightradar24.com/ shows right now FORTE10 plane (Northrop Grumman RQ-4B Global Hawk) which is UAV heading toward Black Sea where it will be spying over Russian invasion of Ukraine and launches of Russian missiles from Black Sea in their bombing of Ukrainian cities.

Flights supplying Ukraine were routinely top viewed flights on that website (they were flying to Rzeszów in Poland, so there was no real risk of Russian shooting them down).

AWACS planes and tanker flying in holding patterns over Poland, Romania and Baltic Sea used to be top observed planes on flightradar24 but I should be now working not looking through flightradar24 planes over Poland ( so I will link https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-60612255 that has video of inside one of them ).

Obviously planes flying combat missions are not publishing data there. Presumably ones training in restricted airspace are not either for also obvious reasons.

You can actually track a large number of military flights on websites such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ a large amount of the time they fly with there transponder on because they don’t want to hit other aircraft.

In Western countries, in peacetime, and in regular shared airspace, yes. They broadcast on ADS-B and are visible on flight tracking websites too.

ADSB Exchange even has a ‘military’ filter to focus on them.

No but the most accepted premise is we give up public goods for national security not because rich guys don’t like it.

The same argument could be used about cars using roads or even pedestrians using sidewalks.

Yes. And it is. Pedestrians don’t have any right to privacy in public and we demand behaviors of them for the privilege of using public commons.

“We should remove transponders from private airplanes as the occupants privacy is more important than the safety they provide” is certainly a plank someone could run on if they wanted to change the current laws.

Instead of removing transponders, perhaps just randomize identifiers before each fly, so individual planes cannot be tracked?

We all do it already with consent, using our phones.

Not everyone holds a cell phone onto them neither there's public data for the position of each one.

And when there is publicly available “who’s walking on the sidewalk” data they probably will

How is that different from e.g. cars? The roads are a public good as well, not?

It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.

Transponders are in planes mostly for safety. Their automated dissemination is part of the safety mechanisms of that transport medium and putting up with them (when required) is part of the privilege of using that public good. Similar to requiring drivers licenses to drive.

>It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.

This is certainly not true in Europe, and in the US there's generally zero restrictions on publicly sharing any kind of PII.

> How is that different from e.g. cars? The roads are a public good as well, not?

For one thing, it's different because there is no law that cars need an active transponder while operating.

But cars do have a license plate anyone is free to look at while they drive by so in that sense it's the same.

Isn't it pretty established in the US that e.g. companies selling bulk license plate scanner data is completely legal, and any "right to privacy" isn't really a thing in public space? (very different in other parts of the world, but US seems to be the relevant context here)

Why would the public need to know which plane is where, as opposed to just a plane being somewhere?

My understanding is that in the US this kind of thing doesn't work on "need to" basis. It's something planes broadcast (for air traffic control reasons) unencrypted, anyone can receive it, there is nothing banning people "hearing" unencrypted radio from telling others what they hear. (Similarly to how police scanners or listening to ATC radio is legal)

In Europe it's not always legal to listen to unencrypted radio transmissions if you're not the intended recipient, but this is heavily country dependent and not rabbit hole worth diving into here.

But what's definitely not legal anywhere in the EU is to record unencrypted radio transmissions, use it to construct a database full of PII, and distribute it like Flightradar and friends do.

E: can't reply below due to ratelimits

>Hence why I said "in the US"...

Hence why I said "in Europe"...

Hence why I said "in the US"...