“There are countries we just can’t go to anymore,” Stanford said of itself and its core group of administrators.
In recent years, the Saudi government has tried to push international aviation regulators to ban or prevent the public dissemination of ADS-B data, although that proposal has not gone far. On the other hand, Musk has threatened legal action against those who share the location of his private jet.
Stanford says its stance has always been to oppose any censorship, regardless of the reason. “How do you make that decision, that one is good and one is bad?” he says.
Independence and decentralization have come with significant advantages. Stanford said law enforcement and the US military have contacted them to provide surveillance services where there are vulnerabilities in government-owned systems. “In Arizona, there were accidents where we had better data than the FAA,” he said.
As storage and server costs ran into the tens of thousands of dollars, ADS-B Exchange turned to commercialization to cover the costs. Although free to use, the site sells advertising and offers paid access to the full dataset for flight enthusiasts and commercial customers.
“It got so big and expensive that we had to commercialize it somehow,” Stanford said. Even then, he added, ADS-B Exchange is a fraction of the price of its competitors.
Stanford says revenue has grown significantly in recent years. “Our plan is to run it until we can quit our full-time job and run it in retirement.” But as revenue skyrocketed, ADS-B Exchange ran into a core organizational problem. “It belongs to one person,” he said.
Last month, when the site was gaining attention for being banned by Twitter, it was rumored that Dan Streufert, the site’s founder and sole owner, was planning to sell the site to Jetnet. It led to anxiety among administrators, who were excluded from discussions.
“My fear has always been for someone to walk in and destroy everything we’ve built,” Stanford said.
Stanford told WIRED in December that if a deal goes through, users of the ADS-B Exchange will rebel. When the press release was released Wednesday morning, he led the mutiny.
Shortly after the deal went public, Streufert was removed from Discord as users of the site contemplated their next move. “ADSBexchange.com done,” Stanford wrote to its fellow users, before posting instructions on how to unplug from the site’s network. Many people have followed those instructions, with some switching to some smaller alternatives, like airframe.
“We are 11,000 [feeders]we are now at 9,500 over a period of several hours,” Stanford said.
“Today is a sad day,” wrote Jack Sweeney, who runs the @ElonJet Twitter account that got him legally threatened by Musk himself, writing on Mastodon following the acquisition announcement. His efforts to track a series of private jets, including those of Tesla and Twitter CEOs, have relied on ADS-B Exchange. “If you deposit ADSBexchange, we encourage you to stop depositing. ADSBExchange was founded on the principles of a community of hobbyists, not for-profit PE companies.”
