On October 23, 2015, Presidential candidate Donald Trump visited Laredo, Texas. He flew on his own plane, itself something of a celebrity with its own Twitter hashtag.

If you had wanted to, you could have tracked the location of his airplane for the entire trip. A number of people did, and shared the information on social media, like Patrick Svitek (the title image is a screencap of the URL he tweeted).

All you needed was the tail number of his airplane.

With that information, you can use any of several flight services to know when and where the plane is. It also provides a possible conversation starter. If you were to run into Mr. Trump and find yourself stuck for an opener, you could try “did that rain in Alabama give you much trouble?”

But maybe the question should be,

Does the ability to track planes in flight create a homeland security problem?

FlightAware, the app used in this example, has been downloaded from the Google Store more than a million times, but it has many competitors.

Modern technology lets us know where all sorts of things are, where we were previously blissfully unaware. A similar issue recently came up when police accountability websites Free Thought Project and CopBlock called on users of the Waze app to share information about where police are located. In reaction, law enforcement groups asked Google (owner of Waze) to remove that capability. In 2011, Blackberry owner Research in Motion agreed to disable PhantomAlert, an app that located police checkpoints, after similar concerns were raised.

In France, where Waze identifies fixed and mobile speed enforcement cameras, the app has responded to a law on this point by noting a broad “danger zone” instead of the exact location. It is not known at this writing how Google will respond, but there have been no changes to date in how this provision functions in the United States.

But back to the private plane. Congress could pass a law that removes the ability to track private planes, but there are no such bills under consideration.

What do you think? Should we care?

Highlight your answer below, click the comment button so the count registers it, then leave your thoughts. (If there’s a little box in the upper right hand of the comment, make sure it says “Public.”)

• Yes
• No

Poll creation methodology courtesy of Katie Zhu.

All images are by the author except as noted above and:

• Trump plane image from Twitter and Instagram user Joe Espinoza https://instagram.com/p/5fTsKiHffj/ https://twitter.com/joeespi/status/624289125924012032