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Comment by jwozn | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate? The bot is collecting and publishing public information.

Yet clearly targeting a single aircraft with a single high profile user.

The fact that the information is public is not a perfect defense, by combining public information, clearly associating it to an individual, and publishing this to a large audience, you can create a sizable threat.

Yep, pretty much.

I'm really disappointed in the way the HN crowd seems utterly unable to see beyond "it's free speech!" when it comes to situations like this.

I generally agree, but this is really not the horse I’d hitch my wagon to. They’re publishing public information about the richest person in the world! He absolutely deserves far more scrutiny than you or me.

Scrutiny yes, stalking no and this is getting uncomfortably close to the latter.

I understand the argument that this could be used to show potentially dubious behaviour, but that could already be shown from the flight records if it occurred without publishing live details of every single flight. That's simply not necessary.

I disagree. The issue with stalking is that it’s threatening. I don’t think Elon is in any way threatened by this.

The flight tracking data is also partially a public good. Didn't it show him asking workers to come in against California sherrif's office order and then fleeing in plane so he couldn't be arrested in California (from early pandemic, might be remembering some details wrong), essentially asking his employees to face jail while dodging any chance of it for himself?

That may still not outweigh the privacy concerns.

He's still a person. Don't publicly track the whereabouts of people, it's creepy, intimidating and threatening.

Conversely, don't become a public figure if you can't handle the costs. This kind of stuff comes with the territory. I don't advocate stalking public figures, but I have more sympathy for random private individuals being stalked than I do people who willingly choose the spotlight.

Public figures are human beings too believe it or not

Yes, of course. And they made a choice willingly, knowing that there is a price. Can't have the upsides of being famous without the downsides, they are a package deal.

They are not publicly tracking any person, though, just a plane I thought.

Would it be any different if they were tracking his car? Does tracking an object owned by a person somehow make it any better? What's next, Musk's TV viewing habits? Browsing history? These are just things and not the person, so it's ok, right? No, of course not.

The comment I responded to was about tracking the person. A person's viewing history is different from their automobile being reported in a public place. Steve Jobs disliked it so much that he would regularly lease cars to avoid having a permanent license plate that could be associated with him. [0] TV viewing habits and browsing history are not public activities occuring in plain view of everyone else.

[0]: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...

This idea that things break down at scale is an ongoing issue in society. People get up in arms over things like red light cameras and speed cameras, for instance, which I think points to serious systemic issues. If we as a society can't tolerate the uniform application of a law for example, maybe the law should be changed. If there are issues with this data being public, the rationale for the data being public in the first place should be challenged, not the downstream providers who utilize that data.

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