Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

This is such a ridiculous take. It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.

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.

View on HN

It's doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally. It's not really doxxing if you take info that's broadcast to the public by law and use that. I put out my resume that has my name, address, and phone number on my public website and I wouldn't consider it doxxing if someone uses that info.

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.

> It’s doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally.

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...

It's incredible the mental gymnastics some people go through to justify behaviors they would find unacceptable if directed to their own person.

Bottom line is: there is no justifiable reason to publish real-time location info of somebody against his wishes other than to harm him.

Those mental gymnastics happen primarily because anyone looking at the situation for longer than a minute can see people in power use mental gymnastics to keep themselves ahead just as much.

The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.

Ah yes, like the Hacker manifesto says public data should not be public.

If they are powerful, there certainly and obviously is.

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.

> If they are powerful, there certainly and obviously is.

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.

That the public has an interest in data, sadly does not guarantee that the data is available.

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.

The people who are pretending to care about free speech now by supporting doxxing efforts are way more hypocritical than anyone who supports free speech making an exception for doxxing efforts.

There were actually Twitter accounts that monitored the jets of both of those too.

Yet Elon has no problem tracking every Tesla owner

Is he putting that info out there for every psycho to see?

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.

No, but the moment it serves Tesla's interest he does.

Until he does, the two aren't equivalent though.

We're past that already.

sounds like you need to go talk to the FAA since they are the ones originally publishing this info rather then a twitter account that is just consuming the info.

Companies that use the data published by the FAA are required to not display information about planes that are part of the LADD program (which Elon's Jet is).

This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.

It’s funny how even despite the fact I didn’t address this situation here to try to speak generally people inevitably found there way back to Musk - but the entire point of doxxing is you take public information and repackage it and focus it in a way to help target an individual. Just because the FAA publishes flight information doesn’t imply they are doxxing someone, if someone built a custom app to track everything a specific famous person was doing including this FAA data, that would be closer to what doxxing actually is.

There seems to be at least somewhat of a reasonable difference between saying "X person is at [x,y,z]" and "A vehicle owned by Y Corp is at [x,y,z]." These seem to me to be in completely different categories.

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.

Bottom line is: You can't claim to be a free speech absolutist and only apply that absolutism to platform far right politicians and Nazis.

Correct I believe that’s literally where the term came from - it’s aggregating the full set of accessible information about a person into a document for sharing it and helping people locate them in meatspace.

Ohhh

> document for sharing

Google "Docs"-ing.

Now I get it.

Most doxxing is just taking public info found by a 2 second Google search given the right starting point.

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.

> It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.

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?

Aren't there public sex offender registries in the US?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com