There is a program you have probably enrolled in, or been told to enroll in, or been assured by your aviation attorney that you absolutely must enroll in if you value your privacy in the sky.
It is called the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed program. LADD. The FAA runs it. It replaced the old Blocked Aircraft Registry Request after the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act mandated a more robust framework for protecting private aircraft owners from public flight tracking.
The sales pitch is clean: enroll your tail number, the FAA instructs its participating vendors to filter your data from public display, and you vanish from the tracking websites. FlightAware. Flightradar24. All the platforms your housekeeper, your ex-spouse, your business rival, or a journalist with a point to prove might use to know that your jet left Teterboro at 6 a.m. and landed in Palm Beach twelve minutes after you told your board you were in Chicago.
The program is real. The FAA administers it in good faith. The participating vendors comply with it seriously.
And it does not do what most people think it does.
THE SETUP
ADS-B is Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. It is a technology mandated by the FAA for virtually all aircraft operating in US airspace.
Your aircraft continuously broadcasts its position, altitude, speed, and a unique identifying code to the world.
Not to the FAA. To the world.
The signal is unencrypted. It is transmitted on a public radio frequency. Anyone with a software defined radio receiver that costs roughly thirty dollars and a laptop can pick it up.
Volunteers around the world do exactly this, feeding the data into open source networks that aggregate global flight positions in real time.
The FAA also collects this data and distributes it to commercial vendors like FlightAware and Flightradar24 through its own feed.
LADD addresses exactly one of these two data streams.
It addresses the FAA feed.
It does not touch the other one.
◆ What the FAA itself says about this, directly on the LADD program page:
"LADD only addresses the use of data through FAA data systems. Non-FAA, third-party data sources are able to capture ICAO aircraft addresses directly from ADS-B Out transmissions."
The question is whether the people enrolling in LADD have read that sentence.
THE HOLE
Jack Sweeney is a flight tracking researcher who became famous for running automated accounts that tracked the private jets of Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg, and a rotating cast of billionaires who would have very much preferred not to be tracked.
Musk banned him from Twitter. Swift's lawyers sent a cease and desist letter. The private jet lobby made his continued operation a priority problem.
Sweeney kept tracking.
Not because he found a flaw in the FAA's program. Because he never used the FAA's data in the first place.
He uses crowdsourced ADS-B data, collected by volunteers with their own receivers, fed into open networks that have no contractual relationship with the FAA and therefore no obligation to honor the LADD list.
Musk's jet is on the LADD list. Swift's jet is on the LADD list.
The LADD list is irrelevant to Sweeney's methodology because the signal those aircraft broadcast is physically present in the radio spectrum, receivable by anyone, and no federal program changes that fact.
This is not a loophole.
It is a structural characteristic of how ADS-B works.
THE OTHER SHOE
In August 2025, reporting emerged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had begun adding aircraft contracted for deportation flights to the LADD list.
Two Avelo Airlines planes. Seven GlobalX aircraft. All used under government contract for deportation operations. All added to a program designed and lobbied into existence as a privacy protection for private jet owners.
Ian Petchenik, communications director at Flightradar24, described the development as unprecedented.
"We are seeing these commercial aircraft being added to the LADD list and then subsequently being employed under contract by the government for these deportation flights. It is certainly new."
The private jet lobby was not pleased.
But the deeper issue is not the optics.
The deeper issue is what the ICE situation reveals about the program's design.
LADD has no restriction on who may enroll. It has no requirement that the aircraft be privately operated. It has no mechanism for distinguishing between a billionaire who does not want a journalist knowing he flew to his third property on the day he announced layoffs, and a government contractor that does not want civil liberties organizations tracking a deportation operation.
The program was designed for a narrow use case. Nobody modeled what happened when the tool escaped its original context.
Now it has escaped.
THE LIABILITY GAP NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT
Here is what the regulatory gray zone actually looks like for the people reading this newsletter.
You enrolled in LADD. Your attorney filed the paperwork. You believe your movements are private. You have structured your travel, your business activities, and in some cases your personal security protocols around the assumption that your flight data is not publicly accessible.
That assumption is wrong.
And the wrongness of it has liability implications that are not theoretical.
✦ SECURITY GAP
The crowdsourced ADS-B network Sweeney uses is not the only entity operating outside the FAA data ecosystem. Researchers, hostile actors, and organized surveillance operations have access to the same thirty dollar receiver technology. Your tail number and flight pattern may be documented in databases you have never heard of, maintained by parties who signed no agreement with the FAA and owe you no courtesy.
✦ REPUTATIONAL GAP
If your travel patterns are discoverable through open source ADS-B data, and a journalist, a short seller, or a litigation team discovers them, your LADD enrollment provides no legal protection. You cannot claim privacy in data that was physically broadcast from your aircraft on a public frequency. Legal scholars examining Sweeney's operation have consistently noted there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a mandatory radio broadcast.
✦ OPERATIONAL GAP
If you choose FAA Source level blocking, the maximum privacy option under LADD, you lose the ability to track your own aircraft using any third party flight tracking system. Your operations team loses the situational awareness tools they depend on. Maximum privacy and operational utility are in direct tension, and the program makes you choose between them.
None of this is disclosed prominently at enrollment.
YOUR ACTION STEPS
1. If you are enrolled in LADD and have not also enrolled in the Privacy ICAO Address program, you have done half the job. PIA addresses the ADS-B broadcast signal itself by allowing your aircraft to transmit a temporary, rotating ICAO code that cannot be easily tied to your registration. Both programs together represent the closest thing currently available to meaningful privacy in the ADS-B era.
2. Ask your security team to audit your aircraft's current visibility in open source ADS-B networks, independent of LADD enrollment. The assumption of invisibility is more dangerous than acknowledged visibility.
3. If you are an operator selling LADD enrollment as a complete privacy solution, that conversation needs to be revisited. The gap between what LADD does and what clients believe LADD does is a material misrepresentation in an environment where privacy litigation is increasing.
A CLOSING THOUGHT
There is a concept in Zen called the finger pointing at the moon.
When a master points at the moon to show it to a student, the student who stares at the finger has missed the point entirely.
The finger is not the moon. It is only the direction.
LADD is a finger. It points toward privacy.
But privacy in the ADS-B era is the moon, and it requires your eyes to lift above the paperwork and look at where the signal actually goes.
Enrollment is not protection. Structure is protection. Understanding is protection.
The document you filed is not the thing itself.
It never was.
Fly with intention. Know what you are broadcasting.
Let’s Stay Connected ✨
I’d love to keep the conversation going beyond this post. If you found these insights valuable or simply want to exchange ideas, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s a great space to share perspectives, build meaningful connections, and grow together.