Nike just made it harder to track executives’ use of private jets – oregonlive.com:
Plane travel has been considered public information because taxpayers help fund the air traffic control system governing the common space, said Chuck Collins of the progressive Institute for Policy Studies.
Collins, who has studied the FAA’s secrecy programs, called Nike’s move an effort to avoid accountability. He said it amounts to Nike saying: “‘We don’t want ProPublica to bother us. We don’t want to show up in the newspaper.’”
I’m not sure why air traffic control system funding makes plane travel public information, particularly private jets. I suppose as long as it’s not real-time data, there’s a case to be made. In other words, if an air traffic control center reports the planes that visited a field in the last, say, year, one can see how that’s a legitimate case for public information.
On the other hand, providing real-time flight data of private jets seems an enormous privacy (and potentially security) violation.