Thank you. I’m sick of seeing so many people defend this nonsense by portraying it as a safety issue. This issue is public. It’s required to be public. Someone pointing out public info is not a safety issue
Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.
If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.
I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.
To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.
1: See GeoWizards fantastic series doing exactly this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...
Bottom line is: there is no justifiable reason to publish real-time location info of somebody against his wishes other than to harm him.
The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.
Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.
Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.
Where is the real-time data on Putin & Biden's whereabouts then?
> what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth
What does that has anything to do with his location?
> free speech
Talking about and inviting others to do harm could very well be free speech, but that doesn't make the ones doing it less of a--holes.
His location is a hint to who he's talking to and what he's doing.
There has been no invitations to do harm. It's not about who's an asshole or not - it's about who's a hypocrite on free speech.
Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.
This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.
Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.
I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.
> document for sharing
Google "Docs"-ing.
Now I get it.
There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.
Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.
I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).
But that's not what was said - there was no exception carved out for that.
The solution to people knowing the location of your private plane is really simple: Don't own a private plane. Most of us are already doing it.
That is of course the better solution. There's something perverse about the entire concept of a private plane.
Still, as much as I dislike his descent into madness, I do understand Musk's safety concerns here.
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?
Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.
Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.
I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.
However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.