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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

A lot of hypocrisy from Elon here, but I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to taking down these accounts that are tracking people as it's so close to a Doxing or could lead to something bad happening.

A few years ago, we were all mad at Uber for their "God View" which tracked celebrity locations -> https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38314832

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Uber used their own private, proprietary information. Flights are public by design. If he had a problem with that, he should not own a jet.

The data isn't publicly available from the government because the plane is on the LADD list https://laddlist.com/aircraft/N628ts

Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.

So the data isn't "public by design" but due to a lack of privacy laws that prohibit selling this sort location data.

The planes literally broadcast their location. It is in fact, public data.

Aggregation of this type of public data (face recognition, license plates, cookies, etc) can absolutely create new privacy concerns. We should have privacy laws that protect us from this type of aggregation. Whether those laws should extend to plane transponder data comes down to the tradeoff between loss of privacy/security and transparency gains.

What I don't like is the argument that purely because some piece of information is "public", we should allow companies to aggregate and sell this data.

100% when it comes to getting legislation out that that limits what data companies can aggregate and sell. But I dont think the current location of the jets of the rich.... that's the starting point for the conversation?!

And as a reminder, these planes literally broadcast their location themselves to the public.

I do think it is worth pushing back on the argument that just because data is public or broadcast, that makes aggregation of that data automatically OK. (edit: e.g. many Bluetooth devices are set to be discoverable and so broadcast a unique Id that could easily be tracked an aggregated to reveal a LOT of location data)

I do think there are some strong arguments for allowing the aggregation of flight transponder data. I'd like to people making those arguments (such as the value of transparency in fighting corruption) rather than backing dangerous lines of argument because they don't like Musk or rich people in general.

Edit 2: One of the things that makes what ADSBExchange doing seem OK to me is the fact that in addition to selling the aggregated data commercially, ADSBExchange makes the data publicly available for non-commercial use. To me, that really helps tip the scales as it supports the transparency argument

Yeah, meanwhile a guy who has millions of followers and keeps spewing conspiracy nonsense about stolen elections is allowed back in because of course nothing bad could ever happen out of inciting that.

Ironic, given Elon now has access to everyone's Twitter data, including location data and private messages - and he's already selling or giving it to others like political figures he wants to influence, mark my words.

> and he's already selling or giving it to others like political figures he wants to influence

Do you have any evidence for this assertion?

Edit: To me, this possibility is why we need laws that protect people from having this sort of private information sold or distributed.

This is publicly available information. It's nothing close to doxing.

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