Can Taylor Swift Really Sue the College Student Tracking Her Private Jet? A Legal Expert Weighs In.

On Tuesday, it came to light that Taylor Swift’s attorneys have threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, a junior at the University of Central Florida, for providing social media updates on the takeoffs and landings of Swift’s personal jet. Sweeney, who has multiple long-standing accounts dedicated to tracking the publicly available flight information of the private planes and helicopters of myriad notable figures and billionaires, has previously made headlines for similar reasons. In 2022, Sweeney and Elon Musk nearly came to legal blows on then-Twitter (now X) over Sweeney’s account, @ElonJet, which was suspended for tracking Elon Musk’s private aviation movements. (Undeterred, Sweeney revived the account as @ElonJetNextDay, which posts announcements of Musk’s jet activity on a delay of at least 24 hours to adhere to the website’s rules.)

Regardless of whether you believe Sweeney is the David to Swift’s Goliath in this situation, the legal threat raises some interesting questions: Is Sweeney’s tracking legal? Or does Swift’s team have a point—if not legally, then at least morally? To answer those questions, Slate spoke with Ryan Calo, a professor of law and information science at the University of Washington, who has previously weighed in on Sweeney’s scuffle with Musk. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: The Washington Post reports that, in the cease-and-desist letter sent to Sweeney, Taylor Swift’s lawyers assert that Sweeney’s social media activity has caused Swift “direct and irreparable harm, as well as emotional and physical distress.” Swift’s lawyers also reportedly posit that there is “no legitimate interest in or public need for this information, other than to stalk, harass, and exert dominion and control.” If that’s true, then why is this flight information public to begin with?

Ryan Calo: First of all, I doubt that the information is public so that people can harass, stalk, take photographs, and so on, of celebrities like Elon Musk or Taylor Swift. Typically the Federal Aviation Administration releases information like that due to issues around safety and transparency, so there is an irony if it makes celebrities feel less safe. I agree with them: There’s no reason to follow Taylor Swift around unless you’re trying to catch a glimpse of her or photograph her for a magazine as paparazzi. Taylor Swift is very likely to be the target of some pretty frightening folks, given her immense visibility and the fact that she’s a woman.

So I think that they’re right as a matter of morality and public policy, but I’m racking my brain to think what a successful cause of action would be. They don’t have a complaint, they just have a cease-and-desist. They’re trying to use language that makes it seem like he has some legal liability here. But I just don’t see it. One [cause of action] could be something called “publication of private fact.” Publication of private fact is premised on the idea that you’ve taken something that you know and most people don’t, and that you’ve put it out there, but you have to do it intentionally in order to cause harm. What’s happening is not defamatory—they’re not lying about her; the purpose of the revelation is not to conspire in a criminal sense, or to aid and abet another criminal offense like stalking. I don’t know precisely why he’s doing it, but you could imagine myriad rationales that have to do with transparency, carbon footprint concerns; there’s lots of reasons that you could have that data available. I don’t see any reason to believe this young man is doing it on purpose in order to help people stalk her or commit another crime.

Isn’t the information that Sweeney is publishing not, in fact, private?

If it is truly public FAA data, then it’s not a private fact. But you also alluded to the fact that there’s some self-appointed sleuths out there who are figuring out where her plane is going. That could amount to private fact. But even if that were the case, publication of private fact requires you to intentionally do it—it is an intentional tort, and intent in tort law requires, at a minimum, substantial certainty. So that’s possibly why you see the lawyers using some of the language that they are; maybe they’re trying to establish that this is substantially certain to cause her harm, especially after they apprise him of that. But the problem is that, even then, your conduct has to be outrageous. And it’s hard to say that his conduct is outrageous when he’s just using data that is available through the FAA website or that other people supplied to him.

The FAA actually allows requests from plane owners who wish for their activity to be hidden in the federal data; per the Post, “Swift’s jet appears to be blocked through such a request.” But so-called “aviation hobbyists” can collect their own data, using widely available receivers that can tap into transponder and air traffic broadcasts, and input it into independent websites such as ADS-B Exchange that aren’t governed by the FAA. If Sweeney is getting his data from such a third party, as opposed to official FAA channels, does that change the protections that he has?

The idea that somebody would painstakingly re-create her location by using a site that ends up mirroring the data of the FAA, but is not beholden to them, reminds me of the big problem involving juveniles in the criminal justice system. Often, they will get their criminal records purged so that they’re no longer in the state databases as having had a conviction, and yet, data brokers who have mirrored that publicly available data are not generally required to get rid of it. I think it’s a big problem we see in privacy, when data that is public—even when the source of the data wants to obscure something about it—is mirrored elsewhere, and they’re not bound by the same requirements [as the original source]. But, once that information is public, especially about a person who could not be more famous, then I think it’s really difficult to reach it under principles of tort or under principles of criminal law, where the idea is you’re enabling somebody else to do something wrong. If you yourself were combing through all of her data in order to show up and take a photograph of her against California paparazzi law, or if you yourself were stalking her using that data, sure, that’d be a crime. It’s no defense to say, “Oh, well, it’s public information.” You did something wrong. But that’s not what this kid’s doing.

I think it’s morally questionable. I think it’s bad for public policy reasons. I think it underscores a real problem in privacy. These are all real things. But I don’t know that they translate into a cause of action in either tort law or criminal law. I think the threat is an empty one by her lawyers, but I completely sympathize.

Does Taylor Swift’s history as a victim of stalking, and the fact that her New York home address is known to the public, give her lawyers any more foundation for a case? Currently, there’s a man facing stalking and harassment charges after he was arrested outside of her townhouse in Manhattan, a location he allegedly visited 30 times over a short timespan. She has a legal and documented history of being targeted by creepy and predatory strangers. 

The way that tort law—and, of course, criminal law—works is that you have to meet the elements of the tort in order to be successful. Even if you meet one element, it doesn’t mean you meet the other ones. For example, if we could say that these were private facts that he’s publishing, or if we could say that he had the intent to publish this in order to cause emotional distress to Taylor Swift, then she would have a better case of meeting the tort element that this is outrageous behavior calculated to cause severe emotional distress. But there is no indication that his intent in publishing this data is aimed at causing her harassment, in part because, A) it’s just flight data, and B) he publishes it about lots of people. It sure helps meet certain elements of the tort that it is plausible that this data will get misused in such a severe way. The problem here is that he just isn’t doing this on purpose.

In 2022, Sweeney was publicly embroiled in a very similar disagreement with Elon Musk, who objected to Sweeney’s publications of his private jet activity and, like Swift, threatened legal action. Though nothing came of the situation legally, various social media accounts of Sweeney’s were suspended. Does Sweeney’s past with Musk change a perception of Sweeney’s intent?

I don’t think it changes his intent. I think the previous altercation just reminds him of something that we already know, which is that celebrities don’t like it when you follow their planes around. Look, I’m a big Taylor Swift fan, but the truth of the matter is we can’t look at her fame and choice to fly in a private jet as a fixed thing about the world and then expect everybody else out there to conform to it because it’s harmful to her.

What the law tries to do is make the person most able to bear the cost of a harm bear that cost, and it also seeks to disincentivize wrongful behavior. It has a variety of goals, and only one of them is met here, which is the idea of this kid not making this data so easily available. I think the previous tussle with Elon Musk probably taught him that folks don’t like this, but also probably taught him that there’s not much they can do about it.

The Post reports that, in this letter from Swift’s attorneys, they state that Sweeney’s actions are “in violation of several state laws,” but they don’t specify them. Do you have any idea of what potential state laws, if any, are in violation?

I don’t know every state’s laws, but I do know that the First Amendment would push back pretty hard on any law that involved people speaking their mind or publishing information that was public in origin. But the law’s full of this stuff. Look at Biden’s executive order. It’s a 100-some-odd pages, official-looking document from the president of the United States about A.I. It doesn’t really do anything. Because he doesn’t have a legal authority to create laws—that’s Congress—he tries to leverage something called the Defense Production Act, which is a stretch. And then he tells basically all the agencies what to do, and, because he has the ability to replace their leaders, they listen to him. But he could just call them and tell them what he wanted to do. So there are times when it’s performative. It’s intended to frighten this person into compliance. But if I’m writing a letter to somebody and saying that they’re violating state law, I’m going to name the law.

Now, let me just say that this is complicated. I do worry about this kid, because, while it is certainly true that there are people who are out to get Taylor Swift, and I don’t doubt that she has a scary existence sometimes—nor do I doubt it about Elon Musk—there are also fans of these two celebrities. In some ways, it’s more responsible for Swift’s team to send a letter like this threatening legal action, even though the threat is empty, than, for example, her telling her fans that she hates this and they should go after this guy. I think the wrong person may decide that they could get into Elon Musk or Taylor Swift’s good graces by hurting him. I’d like to know whether or not he’s been threatened by people who are fans of these folks, because the truth of the matter is, however much we want to say that this is scary for these celebrities, they have so much more power than some dude in his dorm room.

The other reason I worry about him is: Even frivolous lawsuits cost money. In many jurisdictions, there’s something called an anti-SLAPP, which is a statute that permits you to countersue someone if you believe that the suit is motivated by a desire to censor what you have to say. If I’m Taylor Swift’s lawyers, I’m worried about a countersuit in a jurisdiction that has anti-SLAPP. So, he does have that move, but that costs money.

When commentators come to Sweeney’s defense, they tend to point to two things: One is free speech, and the other is this notion that the pushback on his Taylor Swift accounts came at the same time that she was facing climate-related criticism because of all the emissions from her copious private flying, so in a way, it’s a form of holding Swift and other public figures accountable. What’s the basis of those two theories of defense?

I think a lot of this indignation about Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint is completely manufactured. But if we are going to speculate about his motivation being to cause harm to Taylor Swift, then why wouldn’t we also speculate that the reason that he posts this information is because he’s a climate warrior? Each of those things seems, to me, equally plausible, and we don’t have evidence of either one of them.

She is a public figure. Her travel has become a matter of public interest. These privacy torts do not exist if it’s a matter of public interest, so even if, somehow, he technically met the elements of the tort, I think that the First Amendment pushback would be really strong. It’s also about the right of an audience to have information. There’s a lot of First Amendment precedent suggesting that you can’t cut off information flows, both because you’re silencing the speaker but also because you’re withdrawing information from people who have a right to it. And so, whatever his intention might be, there could be lots of people who are following his accounts and looking to him because they are concerned about her impact on the climate. I think that it’s probably not good for him to be doing this, from a moral perspective, due to the possible harm, but somebody who’s really interested in climate issues might disagree with me, and that’s partly the issue: How do we weigh those two things against each other?

You’ve spoken about how we are aware that this is a privacy problem. Do you see the government changing the rules or the protections surrounding privacy?

I think that the FAA should change the rules about people’s private flights. I’ve often complained in my own writing and in talking to reporters over the years about how long it took the FAA to realize that drones presented privacy issues. In the early days, when they were asked by Congress to integrate drones into the domestic airspace, a lot of us said, as part of that safe integration, you really should consider the privacy ramifications of drones. And their response at the beginning was, “Oh, we’re not a privacy organization, our priority is safety and efficiency,” blah, blah, blah. And eventually they came to realize that they have to take privacy more seriously, but I really wish they would make a solution. Because if they never made that information available in the first place, then people couldn’t piece it together, and it couldn’t get mirrored before you even had a chance to object.

Celebrities are people, too—people who, due to the focus of attention on them, are rendered vulnerable and in peril sometimes. And so I do think that the FAA should change these rules. And if they did, there wouldn’t be a First Amendment problem because the data wouldn’t be available in the first place.

Or even just forcing people to delay their relay of information so that people don’t know the second you touch down in a city that you’re there, especially if they have your address.

It’s how we treat the president. You hear about the president’s agenda after it’s taken place, for security reasons, of course.

Or do something about these outside databases that have the license to collect all this information themselves because they can get their own receivers.

It would solve a lot of these problems. And that’s the best place for Taylor Swift’s team to direct their energy, not at one guy. It’s like whack-a-mole: So this guy stops somehow—maybe he loses interest and decides to go into crypto—but the next person can just do this, too. Are they going to sue every single person that does this? I think that going at the source of it is more efficient.