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Comment by jeromegv | Hacker News Reader

Flights are public information. Cars are not. Are you seriously such a fanboy of Elon that you have to pretend to be offended by someone sharing public information that anyone can google and get in 3 clicks? If the 1% doesn't want their private flight info to be shared, then they can just take a normal flight like the rest of us.

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Flights are clearly not public information. I cannot look up where you've been flying on regular airlines recently and that's how it works for virtually everyone.

Reality is, governments and the airline industry could make this system be sufficiently private if they wanted, or at least a lot harder to abuse. There's no particular reason personal details of jet owners have to be linked to the radio transponders.

Or take a friend's jet? Or rent one? There are a lot of ways to travel via plane that don't broadcast your body's location.

No, I'm not a fan boy. I just think it's ridiculous that people are ok with this. I know it's very easy to look up flight data. But looking up flight data and making a Twitter account dedicated to a private plane's movement and then trying to extort the owner is different.

No-one is defending the owner of the account asking for more money in response to Elon asking them to take it down and offering some compensation. However, they didn't take the initiative to approach Elon first and ask for money for removal of the account, and their responses to Elon can be read as just (immature) bravado. So your accusation of 'extortion' looks to me as overhyped as your accusation of 'stalking'.

This sort of repression of free speech is a very slippery slope. It starts with publicly stating the location of Elon's private jet becoming a crime, and ends with a dictator in control of the world's most powerful armed forces.

What are you even talking about? Nobody said anything about a crime. I'm just surprised Twitter hasn't banned the kid.

Your description of the account holder :

> The owner of the account is a stalker attempting to extort his victim.

Extortion is a criminal offense and stalking can also be one, depending on its severity. So that means you're the one who brought crime into the discussion (with wrongful accusations, in my view).

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