The account only posted the location of Elon's private jet, which I'm pretty confident is not a threat unless an attacker has a surface to air missile ready.
This entire premise is so very weak to me. Elon is famous and a public figure and it's his own choice that people have as much interest in him as they do. He does everything he can to be in the public eye. There are tons of plane tracking accounts or applications. There is even one that tracks AF1 which carries one of the most powerful and important people in the world.
And this isn't a location tracker. This account doesn't follow Elon around and Tweet where he's headed once he lands, how long he might be staying, where he went for lunch, etc. And Elon can use completely legal methods to reduce how much of this information is publicly available.
> Just because you can publish information like this doesn't mean it's ethical
And just because some actions MIGHT have negative outcomes doesn't mean they are unethical.
Elon has all the tools to avoid being tracked by a random flight tracking service. If he doesn't use those tools then he doesn't care that much about his privacy. He posts images of him sleeping in the Twitter HQ, which has a publicly listed address. We aren't talking about some powerless individual who is having big companies abuse their privacy.
"Having easy access to his whereabouts at all times" is hyperbole. Only his jet is being tracked, not his physical location at all times.
But knowing when he leaves a city and arrives at another is half the battle. A bad actor who wants to do him harm now know he just landed back in Austin. So if they were planning an attack, they could then try follow him from the airport, find him at home, Twitter HQ et cetera.
And for the record, to me this isn't about Elon. I don't support any of those accounts. I don't care if it's Brad Pitt, Bezos, POTUS, or my next door neighbor, it's Doxxing and it shouldn't be tolerated.
I honestly was unaware, but it has been pointed out to me that Elon even said as much in a tweet from 11/6. He explicitly said it's a direct threat to his personal safety. Sure, in the same tweet he said he would allow the account to continue, but I think that's a perfectly fine thing to change your mind on. I would never wish anyone's safety be put at risk for a dumb Doxxing account in the name of free speech
This guy has been actively trying to make enemies to garner a few "hello there fellow kids" points, actively uses every trick in the book to make sure he not only has to pay zilch in taxes, but draws the maximum in benefits, being one of the richest people on the planet and continuously taking credit for things he at best funded, at worst didn't do anything for. Meanwhile he's throwing up a gigantic smokescreen and misleading people in ways that benefit his company while being disastrous for the environment, and has the gall to show his ideas as some kind of divine intellect.
An account functioning as an event hub for public information regarding his jet is about the least he has to worry about once the chickens come home to roost. If the location alone was that bad, he could give a warning and ask the account to only post climate-related info. These are the people shaming you at every corner and ready to push you under the bus the moment something dares to scratch their empire.
Nothing about their existence is ethical. People defending them under the guise of 'ethics' is exactly how they got there.