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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, there is a difference when its made extremely accessible. Even the courts have seen this as a key difference with surveillance.

My question here is whether there is actually a rule here and whether that rule will be followed, or was it just done capriciously because Musk didn't like it.

I have my guesses, of course, but I haven't checked if they are true.

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Perhaps a public interest argument could be made here for making this information more accessible. The whereabouts of a CEO of multiple companies could be of interest for investment decisions. For an ordinary private citizen this would be different.

Then he’d be enforcing this for all such accounts that post aircraft movements using flight tracking data, right?

But he isn’t.

You're right. It is contingent on the rule being applied fairly. Any one person making these decisions is bound to exhibit a bias, but we do not know if it was his decision alone. He may very well have asked others if it would be fair. That said, the real test will be if he can establish a fair system that self-patrols the speech on twitter.

> there is a difference when its made extremely accessible

This has absolutely no meaning and has no parallels to surveillance of private life.

Sure it does. Being able to observe license plates on the street is different from observing all license plates and publishing a real time feed of their location.

The police would find that useful, but courts haven't always been favorable: https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/court-south-carolinas-...

I can get the same information on flightradar24. You want to ban them from the Internet?

Don't be silly. Musk just wants to ban their Twitter account if they start to post the information to his specific plane. As long as they post specifics about someone else's plane, their account will be considered in good standing.

Since it was an individual not linked to a website, it's an even easier decision for him.

It's not the same information.

flightradar24 tracks jets. Go ahead and see if you can figure out where Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison is from flightrader24. You can't unless you know the jet number they happen to be using.

@ElonJet is effectively tracking Elon and broadcasting that, and only that, information to the whole world.

In theory you could track Elon yourself by correlating public info (figuring out which jets he owns and using flightrader24) but it's orders of magnitude more effort and I don't see how "you can figure it out" justify "publish it to the whole world".

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