> has sued a kid for making a twitter bot
Kid or not, it's doxxing. Musk could have sued him outright but instead he asked him nicely to take it down and offered a good amount of money too. Kid's own fault he didn't take it.
Kid or not, it's doxxing. Musk could have sued him outright but instead he asked him nicely to take it down and offered a good amount of money too. Kid's own fault he didn't take it.
What you're also missing is that US legal system can bankrupt you financially and mentally if you're poor enough. Musk is clearly in the wrong there, there is no even gray area.
Doxxing is typically done from public sources, only very unusually it's some kind of uncovered private information (e.g. by hacking). Most of doxxing is piercing together public information and spreading it among the masses.
For example where I live there is a general law about harassment and it's broad enough to cover this case, to have that Twitter account closed, and to have the person tried at criminal court and at the very least fined and put under supervision, if not imprisoned - if it happened inside this jurisdiction, of course.
It doesn't matter at all if it's from public sources or not. A lot of things are in the public now - because of careless data handling, due to leaks and hacks, and a lot of information is easily retrievable with social engineering. Making a special Twitter account that automatically announces every move that a person does with their vehicle is really way out of the norm.
Our society should not accept this, not even if the target is a rich person. How do you expect people are going to behave to poor people if this is how they're allowed to treat rich people?
Is a Twitter account that uses this API to post all movements of a single private individual, or their vehicle really so unobjectionable, just because it comes from a public API?
At some point we will need either very strong social norms, or case law, or most likely legislation to address this issue.
Addressing the privacy impacts of programmatic operations on public data (i.e. what you can see from a window, or a satellite) is an important frontier for privacy and a largely unsettled question. You're just seeing it play out in this case because data for this particular vehicle type is public.
(Which, I should add, is surely just for legacy reasons and definitely a terrible idea. There's no public interest in being able to track everyone with a plane any more than there is a public interest in being able to see comparable data for anyone with a bicycle, car, or cellphone. Or look at it this way: when private flight become 100x cheaper and safer to the point where we fly instead of drive, do we want our movements tracked just because we were in the air? Of course not.)
I doubt private flying will become that frequent within the next 100 years. How would it possibly be safer than driving? Now instead of just dealing with distracted, sleepy, drunk drivers on the road, I have to worry about accidents raining down from the sky? Please, just build train systems and well designed, well-zoned, walkable cities and we won’t need to worry about flying.
I'm on the board of an organization (fightforthefuture.org) that has been leading on passing legislation for limiting the use of biometric surveillance, like face recognition. That's a small subfield of the larger problem of the privacy impacts of programatically analyzed public data, but people seem to understand it intuitively and that makes it a good place to start.
Also, I mentioned the flying cars example not to assert that there will be flying cars, but as a way to illustrate why this data should not be public: i.e. because it would be clearly bad to have this data public for a more popular vehicle type.
I should also say that it is definitely wrong for people with Musk's level of resources to sue people without those resources over something probably this minor.
I'm just chiming in to point out that we should not consider aggregated public data fair game just because it comes from public data, because some uses of this data (including this one, though again probably in a minor way, though I say "minor" knowing almost nothing about Elon Musk's personal threat model so maybe I'm wrong) can have a harmful impact on individuals and the public.
Air travel is a tightly regulated business and all flights are registered with and regulated by the FAA, which requires certain information about all flights to be publicly exposed. Thus, a function of air travel is that publicly available information is governmentally mandated to exist. The usage of this publicly available information is clearly enshrined.
The day to day of a child on the other hand is something that should not have information published publicly about, and entities who were to collect and share this information may be violating the law. I will not comment too much on the legality, but the ethics of such an action as described are also extremely questionable.
And before the internet, it was not public at all!
So all he had to do was get 10 million dollars and he'd win. Simple!
You can't be for vigorous suppression publication of factual information about yourself that you dislike being known and radically pro-free-speech. They are opposed views on right and wrong.
He clearly stated that free speech applied to Twitter means that in the case of a grey zone, it's preferential not to censor. Which is not the same as an absolute take on free speech. People are running with a claim that was never made.
As for doxxing, I find it disturbing how a technicality is used to defend information that is clearly threatening. Recently, in the Netherlands extremists have been digging up the addresses of some politicians they dislike and publishing them on Twitter. It destroys their lives and basic sense of safety.
Technically, the addresses were public. Do you really see that as a sane justification to collect said data, actively publish it to an extreme audience with the very obvious intent of intimidation, and directly increase the odds of just one nutjob to do untold damage? It's fine because the data was "public"?
I’m not discussing his free speech claims, I am talking about the claims about Musk from the opponents of any restriction on legal speech on Twitter.
They may be misinformed about Musk's free speech claims, but I’m also not concerned with why they are in error.