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FR24 performing Self-Censorship for aircraft ALERTS

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  • FR24 performing Self-Censorship for aircraft ALERTS

    Flight Radar 24 are self-censoring the alerts you create for certain private aircraft types.

    Try creating an alert, in the FR24 app, for an E55P (ICAO for an Embraer Phenom 300) for either a local or global area.

    You only receive 'ALERTS' on those aircraft that are fully or partially identified in FR24. For any other E55P aircraft, you receive no ALERTS at all.

    In the FR24 app, if you 'filter' on E55P, then all E55P aircraft are displayed... that is full, partial and de-identified aircraft are shown. There appears to be no issues here on privacy or confidentiality of the aircraft position data being used to display on the map.

    FR24 management have decided to perform censorship of these private aircraft ALERTS but then... allow filtering and display of these same aircraft that are blocked for sending ALERTS.

    FR24 management have said this censorship is a "business decision" which seems unusual when FR24 app filtering displays what an FR24 ALERT would display.

    It seems that FR24 have applied this ALERT policy globally without any application from all those private aircraft owners/operators to exclude them from ALERTS given they show up on the map when the said aircraft type is filtered.

    Can anyone explain the logic of this 'business decision'?

  • #2
    It has nothing to do with censorship but it's just a technical limit, it's not possible to set an alert for a blocked aircraft. It's fully possible to setup alerts for all aircraft and and aircraft types that are not blocked.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Mike View Post
      It has nothing to do with censorship but it's just a technical limit, it's not possible to set an alert for a blocked aircraft. It's fully possible to setup alerts for all aircraft and and aircraft types that are not blocked.
      What utter nonsense. I think Voltron understands that alerts can only be set for unblocked types - I think the query is really about why so many types are totally blocked in the first place. A technical limit is one that is imposed by the inherent capability of a system. FR24 chooses, and has chosen for many years, to block details of all corporate jets whether or not the aircraft owner has requested it. It even blocks Boeing 737 Business Jets and some helicopters. Specific owner requests for blocking should generally be respected and for the most part they are by several flight trackers and no valid case can be made to have military and law enforcement aircraft or those that carry heads of state visible to everyone.

      FR24 just goes further than anyone else and pretty much blocks everything that is not an airliner, glider, propeller driven aircraft or Google Loon balloon. The policy appears to be a strategy to avoid even the slightest complaint from well-heeled operators who like to cover their tracks but in effect have little legal right to prevent anyone from viewing their flights because in most places it is public information that is streamed out into the ether by the aircraft. For instance, you can view many of those blocked flights locally on your own receiver and by linking to public databases it is possible to synthesize much of the same info that is displayed by FR24. The catch, of course, is that this only works for planes a couple of hundred kilometers around you whereas FR24 is global.

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