“There’s countries we can’t go to anymore,” Stanford says of himself and a core team of administrators.
In recent years, the Saudi government has tried to push international aviation regulators to forbid or prevent the public dissemination of ADS-B data, though that proposal hasn’t gone far. Musk, on the other hand, has threatened legal action against those sharing the location of his private jet.
Stanford says their position has always been to oppose any censorship, regardless of the reason. “How do you make that decision, that one person is good and one person is bad?” he says.
Being independent and decentralized has come with significant advantages. Stanford says they have been contacted by law enforcement and the US military to provide surveillance where there have been gaps in the government-owned systems. “In Arizona, there’s been accidents where we’ve had better data than the FAA,” he says.
As hosting and server costs mounted into the tens of thousands of dollars, ADS-B Exchange moved to commercialize to cover its costs. While it is free to use, the website sells ads and offers paid access to its full suite of data for flight enthusiasts and commercial clients.
“It was getting so big and expensive we had to commercialize it somehow,” Stanford says. Even then, he adds, ADS-B Exchange is a fraction of the price of its competitors.
Revenue has increased significantly in recent years, Stanford says. “Our plan was to run it until we can quit our full-time jobs, and run it into retirement.” But as revenue has shot up, ADS-B Exchange has had a core organizational problem. “It’s owned by one person,” he says.
Last month, as the site was getting headlines for being banned from Twitter, rumors swirled that Dan Streufert, the site’s founder and sole owner, was planning to sell the website to Jetnet. It led to anxiety among the administrators who were being left out of the discussions.
“My fear has always been that someone comes in and destroys everything we’ve built,” Stanford says.
Stanford told WIRED in December that, if a deal went through, ADS-B Exchange’s users would revolt. When the press release went out Wednesday morning, he led the mutiny.
Shortly after the deal became public, Streufert was removed from the Discord as the site’s users contemplated their next move. “ADSBexchange.com is done,” Stanford wrote to his fellow users, before posting instructions on how to unplug from the website’s network. Many followed those instructions, with some flipping over to some smaller alternatives, like Airframes.
“We were 11,000 [feeders], we’re now at 9,500 in the span of a few hours,” Stanford says.
“Today is a sad day,” Jack Sweeney, who ran the @ElonJet Twitter account that earned him legal threats from Musk himself, wrote on Mastodon following the acquisition announcement. His efforts to track an array of private jets, including that of the Tesla and Twitter CEO, relied on ADS-B Exchange. “If you feed ADSBexchange we encourage you to stop feeding. ADSBExchange was founded on the principles of hobbyists community not for-profit PE firms.”