Meta Bans Accounts Tracking Private Jets for Zuckerberg, Musk
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The FAA mandates that the jet broadcast its location over ADS-B, mostly to avoid being hit by other jets.
There are fortunately many websites that aggregate data from honorable volunteers with ADS-B receivers. So much that it’s easy to determine Mark probably took a trip to Cabos in late September.
I suppose it’s not explicitly public that it’s mark’s jet, the FAA has it registered to A7P TRUST CO INC TRUSTEE in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Another quick Google will lead you to an article that talks about how Mark’s last house was sold by an LLC managed by A7P (real estate transactions and their parties are also public data in most US jurisdictions). It’s not as if these accounts were revealing deep secrets, that were otherwise undiscoverable.
I guess now he knows how the rest of us feel about be tracked?
(If you’re wondering what else might be headquartered there, just take a look at satellite view on Google maps)
Privacy for me but not for thee.
This is the same asshole who called his users dumb fucks for trusting him, ran a PR campaign with slogans like "privacy is dead", got filthy rich by exploiting our personal data, and used that wealth to buy all the mansions around his, for privacy.
We’ve all said some stupid shit and later apologized. The healthiest thing is for everyone to move on.
I moved on years ago, but he probably still has my data.
Same applies here.
"Moving on" and letting a social parasite continue to profit from our personal data seems very far down the list of healthy things.
It's the idea that someone arguing against something they think is wrong (on moral, strategic, practical grounds - it doesn't matter) is somehow less valid because it's unlikely that the arguing person will ever be personally affected by it.
It's completely bogus, though; technically, it's an ad hominem. A distraction.
I frequently get laser-focused targeted ads that actually help me discover products I love.
Unsure how I’m getting exploited. Seems to me I’m better off all round and all I had to do was to be alive in 2024.
You understand the purpose of advertising is to attempt to manipulate you into spending money you wouldn't otherwise, right? Even if you enjoy the product, I too enjoyed smoking. A lot. I miss it actually.
The point is that it's targeting your brain, and the monkey-brain of humanity in general, with the intention of siphoning money from you to them. Hyper-consumerism isn't a virtue, it's an addiction. Sincerely, I doubt you'd be worse off if you bought less stuff. Or, rather, considered your purchases in a less impulsive manner - buying from an ad is impulsive.
I also struggle to understand how Facebook and Instagram have made anyone "socially richer". From where I'm standing, the proliferation of social media has greatly increased all the bad parts of human social nature. Competitiveness, insecurity, self-hatred. These platforms are designed for maximum engagement and as such they target your most sensitive emotion, particularly fear.
It's gotten to a point where most people cannot even socialize in-person properly due to the fear. Everyone is hyper-aware of how they may be perceived, and everyone is constantly comparing themselves to others. In addition, fear about the state of the world has been on the rise for a while. There's 0 doubt in my mind that social media has been instrumental to this degredation.
I was buying more generic stuff before, now I’m buying products that are tailor made for the very specific demographic I am. Win-win for me and for the entrepreneur targeting me. Who cares if Facebook also benefits? Who cares if that entrepreneur becomes a billionaire? I get a gadget/book/product that solves my specific problem. I just don’t see how I, or anyone, is the victim here.
> socially better
I have vastly more contact with family and old friends now. I’ve had career opportunities from Facebook messages with old pals.
> people are going nuts due to social media
I have no answer to this one, except that we clearly have to mature into this as a culture, the same way we’ve done with phasing out smoking and are currently phasing out alcohol.
People are only getting sucked into social media vortexes because of bad mental habits they had going into it. Banning social media for under-16’s and changing attitudes towards it will certainly help a ton. If you use it as a connection tool, it’s amazingly valuable and helpful.
Naturally we can take measures to try to prevent ourselves from developing an addiction. But ultimately the product itself will always attempt to undo those.
In my view there's two camps of people: those who have to recognize this reality, and those that haven't. I have seen many family members literally destroy their lives and relationships due to the dopamine addiction they've developed with social media. They now only respond to blatant lies, conspiracies, racism, homophobia, and the most extreme of emotions. The trouble is this is a unique addiction, one that does not rely on a substance. I have no doubt I would have an easier time weaning them off of heroin than off of Facebook.
But you have to balance what you give and get so it remains mutually beneficial. You can choose the optimal level of your engagement, including none at all.
Just like McDonalds doesn’t make people fat, Facebook doesn’t make people sad.
I’m really sorry about your relatives getting sucked in, but wouldn’t they have fallen for some other thing if not Facebook? There is lots of shit out there on the radio, TV, books, cults.
You're correct that McDonald's doesn't hold a gun to your head and make you fat. That doesn't mean McDonald's plays no role in making you fat.
As with everything, there are many compounding factors that contribute to an outcome. If McDonald's only sold, say, kale salads, would you gain the same amount of weight? No, right? So therefore, McDonald's must have some hand in making people fat.
Again, I circle back to Tobacco because nicotine is plainly addictive, but do you truly believe that the Tobacco industry had nothing to do with societal smoking? That's rhetorical, I know you don't believe that because it's so obviously incorrect.
While social media does not contain nicotine, how confident are you that it is not addictive? For me, I'm not very confident.
> but wouldn’t they have fallen for some other thing if not Facebook? There is lots of shit out there on the radio, TV, books, cults
And instead of smoking, could those people have just gotten addicted to sunflower seeds? Well, why didn't they?
Because the nature of the medium and product matters. Social media is always immediately available. It features bright colors. And it's extraordinarily fast-paced. Compare that to a book - and it should be obvious why people are addicted to Facebook and not To Kill a Mockingbird.
We come down on different sides of this - don’t assume people who don’t agree with you are being children.
2. To the extent that FB is addictive, it should be treated the same as alcohol and tobacco as I noted earlier. Restrictions on young people. A cultural movement to regard use/overuse as uncool.
Meta has been a huge positive for me and many others; just because you hate it doesn’t make it fundamentally bad.
Consider: if McDonald's had the power, right now, to rid the world of Ozempic - would they? I think absolutely they would.
> Restrictions on young people. A cultural movement to regard use/overuse as uncool
These are rather vague and not really how things have gone historically. Smoking stopped working because every doctor was telling you it would kill you. And then it became very, very hard to smoke. You couldn't smoke just about anywhere in public. And then you couldn't even smoke in your rental car, or apartment, or hotel.
If you could only access Facebook in the confines of a property you own, I imagine it's use would plummet. I don't think a "cultural movement" could do that. Especially when such a cultural movement would need to take place ON Facebook. Because it's a platform.
Bye bye.
To clear up why I'm so blunt about these things - there's a large influx of people who knowingly play stupid, and it's exhausting. What you're arguing is so obviously wrong and not even remotely in-tune with reality that I must assume you're either playing stupid or are really just that naive.
Most likely you're a smart person with a brain capable of deducing even simple logic like "make them money = they continue practices". So you're probably just playing stupid, which I don't care for. "Know nothing" types aren't worth arguing with.
That is a completely bizarre and alien mindset to my own.
I mean, when I'm browsing and searching on Amazon, yeah, it is handy that Amazon kind of analyzes what I am looking for and gives suggestions to what I might want from their catalogue. That seems logical to me.
But I'm not gonna just give some company all my life's data and what I'm doing and not, and then let them decide what products I should get.
That’s worth nothing if you don’t mean it. It’s not like he apologised and changed his behaviour.
> The healthiest thing is for everyone to move on.
No, the healthiest thing would be for Meta to stop exploiting everyone’s data. Then we can consider moving on.
It’s like a guy is repeatedly punching you in the face, apologises but continues doing it, and you’re saying “well, it’s healthy for us to just move on” while still being punched in the face.
Interesting.
For example, following people around in the real world, aka stalking, is frequently accompanied by threats or acts of physical violence, especially for famous people. Even for normal people, being tracked in the real world frequently leads to theft, burglary, or harrassment. On the other hand, being tracked by social media companies does not commonly result in either of these outcomes. Why? Because our actual physical bodies exist in the real world, making it an arena with much higher stakes.
Imagine if Facebook tracked everyone's physical location, saved it to a log, and then published that log to a public website, while keeping it updated in real time. Do you think people would find that an upsetting addition to what Facebook does now? Would you find that to be an upsetting addition? If so, you must admit there is therefore a difference between doing that and what they do now. If there was no difference, then there would be nothing additional to be upset about.
This is not me defending Facebook's tracking. This is simply me refuting the numerous assertions you've made in this thread that Facebook's tracking is "identical" to real-world stalking combined with publication of that information. It's not.
Unless you live in some jurisdiction like the EU and diligently refused to accept cookies on every website.
People have all their friends and family on Facebook and still want to talk to them. People have orgs, businesses, support groups, anything on Facebook. They don't accept the garbage conditions because they decided, but because it's their only way to do it.
Congratulations for being in the privileged position where you get to do so and still participate in society and make a living. For millions, that's not the case (hint: Whatsapp).
All we know is Person X landed in Port Y. that doesn't narrow down much on where they are like a car in a parking lot.
Tracking a car is fully legal, you can use ALPRs, follow the car etc.
What you cannot do is attach your own tracking devices to cars, just like you cannot attach one to Zuck's or Musk's plane.
And yes, you cannot attach one to a jet. But the jet needs to follow FAA regulations so we don't have to.
As an example:
Shohei Ohtani bought a house in Los Angeles a while ago, this transaction is public information by law and anyone so inclined can query the applicable public databases for it.
Two of the biggest Japanese media outlets (Fuji TV and Nippon TV) then sent crews out including helicoptors to film his house from all angles, declaring this house at so-and-so address is Ohtani's house on national television.
The result? Ohtani and the Dodgers blacklisted them from the press corp[1][2], and for good reason because it became a physical safety concern. Ohtani subsequently sold the house since he couldn't practically live there anymore.
The moral is, if you aggregate public information to track a specific individual or entity, don't be surprised when you get kicked out for stalking and invasions of privacy.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1ddswdu/japanese_...
[2]: https://www.si.com/mlb/dodgers/news/dodgers-penalize-two-jap...
Tracking billionaires' jets doesn't stop them from using their jets for their intended purposes.
No, there isn't. As far as what they are, Ohtani, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Joe Average are all just ordinary citizens unless I missed a memo.
There is a difference in that someone like Zuckerberg is a more valuable target than others, but you're just making excuses to justify your snooping. The fact that Zuckerberg snoops doesn't excuse snooping on him, either.
Zuckerberg bought an entire island just to have his own private playground. Elon Musk brags about being the world's richest man and randomly ruins thousands of peoples' lives just because someone on the internet made him feel bad that morning. They're not ordinary people; they're people who made money by exploiting others.
I don't think that the richest lawyers deserve my deference just because we're in the same they're also in tech.
Also who wants to sit in a jet seat that someone else has sat in. Gross.
It's a finite world and we all share it. You're going to be drinking water someone else drank and breathing air someone else breathed. Cleaning is cheaper than making something unique to everyone of the eight billion people in the planet.
If everyone lived like spoiled billionaires the world would be a hell scape within a month, just based on air quality.
This is true of any capital asset. Broadly speaking, buying crap you don't need because you think it's a tax deal is a hobbyhorse of the middle class. Not the wealthy.
I would guess yes.
Private planes do sit unused but, if you use them frequently enough it starts to make sense to use especially since you can reliably get features that a charter plane doesn't like a tv, many people on the plane, places to sleep.
I don't see how that's fortunate. I don't feel any particular need to breach these individuals privacy, and the only use case I can think of for these things is to stalk and harass them. This data ought to be better protected, and the flipancy with which people broadcast it is shameful.
Yes, that's sarcastic. It's still the exact same thing he's been telling us all these years, so I have a hard time scraping up much sympathy for his plight. Being tracked everywhere sucks, doesn't it? Turns out it's not only the tech giants who can cobble that information together.
The data is impossible to protect since the very underlying basis is that it can be received by anyone within range. That basis being very very very important to planes not hitting eachother and being found by ATC.
ATC usually uses transponder replies and not ADS-B. Totally correct otherwise.
Accountability if something does happen. We can't just randomly assign ID's to do that without finding some way to trace who took what ID (ruining the point). These are private jets so they have no reason to keep record of flights like public airlines.
All I'm saying is that there's no technical reason why that info has to be broadcast over the air, unencrypted, for anyone with a radio to hear. If we wanted to fix that, we could. This just seems like an obviously correct statement to me. I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't want to. Maybe we shouldn't. But we could. It is within our power.
I guess people just seem to find the "privacy for me but not for thee" angle too delicious to give up and feel the need to justify it to themselves? That's the only reason I can think that someone would say something like "the data is impossible to protect" with a straight face. Politics brainworms in action.
I agree in principle because I think everyone should have privacy. I disagree in this case because of the massive loss in privacy that these individuals have effected… which means I’m probably just vindictive.
I really hope nothing happens to these people and if it does I hope whoever tracks them obsessively would feel guilty.
Basic humanity.
yes, they are public figures who choose to use a private jet. The mass tracking is stealing data from barely consenting users. Very different.
> if it does I hope whoever tracks them obsessively would feel guilty.
actual stalkers probably feel little remorse. Unreasonable people are unreasonable for a reason.
If the potential of individuals being stalked as bad as you say, how much stalking do social media companies enable by their existence? A musician was shot dead after the assailants learned of their location from an Instagram picture - do you think Mark shown basic humanity towards the victim since then?
Similar with Elon's jet:
- was registered to a company with an extremely SpaceX-y name, Falcon Landing...
- the address of that company is 1 Space Drive... (edit: it may be Rocket Road)
- when you search that address, Google reports, "Businesses associated with this address: SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company".
"Gee, I wonder whose this could be?"
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Guess we better pray they don’t alter the deal further. It doesn’t work like this for any other registered government service, from radio licenses to securities brokers; why should it for planes? …and wouldn’t this just be subject to FOIA requests anyway, so that all it does is provide a delay? But again, why should they get special treatment?
To nicely see CO2 impact of these people.
Also for someone who is pushing the metaverse to replace face to face communication, he is surely travelling to meet other people face to face quite a lot!
On top of that, Zuck never seemed to care about the consequences of tracking people's behaviour, so tit for tat, I'd say.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
Think about this next time your paper straw falls apart and Zuck is talking about climate change.
>Zuckerberg, a very vocal advocate for climate change action, has added a $300 million mega-yacht to his collection, which includes a Gulfstream G650 jet.
The problem with carbon tax is the opposite. It would disproportionately tax poor higher. The carbon usage doesn't go up by 100x if the income increases by 100x.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgA0UgSEDjI (2m22s)
IIRC carbon tax would be at point of use? So biggest "hard to transition" polluters like metal, concrete, electricity would pay most?
IIRC 2, most carbon tax advocates are also huge into investing in public transit, EVs, weatherization, heat pumps. In fact, BIL and IRA stipulate 40% apportionment. So doesn't that mitigate the regressiveness of a carbon tax?
No, the people using metal, concrete, electricity would pay it. It's not like the profitability of industry goes down over tax.
Source?
Do you think the "greater share" he "earned" is really 10,000x the average tech worker? Or 640,000x the minimum wage?
He was clearly worth the money for those people.
Yes. It doesn't seem unreasonable to the point of dismissal to consider that he's changed the world to within many orders of magnitude of that which the avererage person, particularly the average minimum-wage earner, does. That doesn't mean he has. But the number being four or five orders of magnitude doesn't strike me as damning.
Golly.
He changed the world, so now he gets to burn it?
Non sequitur. A college student having a pet can be reasonable. That doesn't mean they can do whatever they like with it.
Yes. That is my point
Destroy the world = unreasonable
Nobody is saying the second but you. They are unrelated, hence the non sequitur.
Burning tonnes of carbon in your private jet
Zero for your private jet
> Do you think it matters if they offset it?
What does that even mean, if not crooked lies and imaginary foolishness?
For example, consider the Tobacco industry. While yes they did, and somewhat still do, make a lot of money, they did not create any value. They siphoned it - they exchanged the purchase of tobacco for the cost of healthcare. I'm speculating, but if you were calculating the communal cost, that is the profits of tobacco minus the healthcare costs, I'm positive it would be negative.
Therefore, tobacco has a negative value onto the world, but it is profitable. The profit is a facade, that money is really stolen. This demostrates one of the core flaws with current economic systems - you can create profit without creating value. You can simply move money around and get some profit, and you can even destroy money and yet make money.
Keep in mind Facebook gets it's profit via advertising. The money they make is due to manipulating people to spend their money on things they wouldn't otherwise buy. The analysis is difficult, and I'm not saying what they're doing is bad per se, but the actual value they create is certainly debatable.
All that is to say, simply changing the world is a meaningless metric. Certainly, I can change the world for the worse, if I want, and profit in-between. In such a scenario not only am I not equivalent to a janitor, I actually create less value. While making orders of magnitude more money.
If someone had 10,000 tons of gold, they would have made a similar “hourly wage” this last year.
This has nothing to do with earning anything. It’s about value appreciation of an already held asset.
Really?
> the rich have earned their greater share of the national wealth/output (including CO2 emission budget),
Do you think so?
The future of our organised society is threatened by this. Is that OK if you are rich and have "earned [sic] their greater share"
Think about it....
The methodology used for that headline is questionable. Most of that comes from their investments rather than flying private jets or whatever. That's questionable because it's not entirely obvious who the emissions of a company should be allocated to. Why should BP's shareholders be on the hook for the emissions from the oil it sells, rather than its customers who are actually burning the oil?
Both drug users and drug dealers are considered complicit in the social impacts of that business.
The company who made the breakfast of a rapist should be charged with the crime?
It is what a person does with that breakfast cereal not the cereal itself.
The company is not literally investing in the endeavor of the rapist, the teacher is not literally investing in the outcome of the killer, investors/funders literally expect the outcome of the thing they invest in to continue without ambiguity. These are much less fitting than the drug-dealer analogy.
I literally own tobacco company stock and accept that I am complicit in the sale of cigarettes, it's not much of a leap.
Either they consume the oil, or they can't drive, and therefore can't get a job, and will therefore die. So, they must consume the oil. Some have enough money to buy electric or hybrid - them, I would say, you can attribute SOME of the effects of the oil they use.
Oh, come on. Counting the carbon emissions of the companies in their stock portfolio is completely absurd.
Context matters.
I would be the opposite of angry if Zuck grounded his private jets, and walked
I'll take this one. Honestly, environmental impact is a lower priority reason for it.
That being said, if you're reading this comment, you very likely in the top 20% of carbon emitters globally, so don't get all smug about it.
In actuality, consumers have little to no choice in the products they use. I couldn't live a plastic-free life even if I tried, and I'm somewhat well off. When you have to shop at Walmart to make it, your influence is even less.
It's a strategy in responsibility shifting. Rationally, the source of pollution does not lie in the single mother eating with her family at Waffle House and using a plastic straw.
Yes and no.
These are almost never recycled and in a lot of places they are burned, not buried so they do emit CO2.
Unfortunately in Europe they replaced them with pfas coated paper which is worse for health and pollution (forever plastic)
The Pacific garbage patch is mostly from fishing nets, and the other sources of plastic pollution are mainly from riverside cities too poor to have good waste management.
The whole plastic straw scare is so obviously attacking a minor non-issue at significant personal inconvenience, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was planted by climate deniers to make people angry at or cynical about actual environmentalism.
I agree with the latter, and I suppose I indirectly contribute to it as a society.
So what you are saying is that billionairs are a million times more climate friendly per-capita than us plebs. /s
Their platforms are basically foreign interference and misinformation backdoors into our society, they've done an insane amount of damage and this move by them, proves how problematic and invasive their own products actually are. However, for these people, they can just "turn off the problem" because they literally own the platform.
How? They're acting like typical plutocrats. Only nuance is they are hedging in case America does succumb to revolution and ensconce them (or their rivals) as the new aristocracy.
Look at how Russia's oligarchs behaved when the Soviet Union fell and Moscow was trying democracy. Or hell, how politicians in the late Roman Republic and early Empire behaved. Lots of this sort of posturing and deflection, full in the knowledge that when democracies collapse--even flawed ones--you have elite-on-elite violence (as violence becomes a valid political tactic) amidst a massive rush of wealth upwards.
It's more like creepy stalking, voyeurism, and abuse of power.
And, in the case of some celebrities, who as a category have been known to have mentally-ill, homicidal stalkers, it's even more tasteless, IMHO.
In this case.
When one person burns so many tonnes of carbon, because greed and selfishness, this plebeian is interested
The argument that it’s really about CO2 emissions is not persuasive – you could track each billionaire’s total CO2 output without also broadcasting their location in real time.
You can absolutely have a free speech position that supports a broad variety of political speech while disallowing the real time tracking of citizens – I see no hypocrisy there either.
Some people are also saying that he’s a hypocrite for tracking others while not wanting to be tracked himself. If he was broadcasting other people’s real time location while protecting his own, then that would make sense. He’s not doing anything like that, though.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
Nah, the rich get away with this more.
Definately a quote to keep in your pocket, though.
They barely care about harassment/stalking on their own platform that is objectively illegal. So i don't feel sympathy here.
>If he was broadcasting other people’s real time location while protecting his own, then that would make sense.
It's a bit frustrating how many people here don't understand the difference of precision in knowing plane data and car/foot data. What use is "Person is in City" to the point where they make an argument of "risk of physical harm?".
[1]https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...
[2]https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...
Banning people from sharing links to public tracking data demonstrates that their commitment to speech is extremely shallow. This suggests that despite their claims, supporting free speech was never a priority on their platforms, and was simply cover for allowing content which helped metrics or aligned with their political goals.
1. The entity can not legally do X.
2. The entity can legally do X, but they're engaging in lies/hypocrisy/favoritism and deserves to be roundly called out for being a bad actor.
Musk is an even more obvious case of hypocrisy. The "free speech absolutist" is very selective about when it applies.
What? That's literally why people use Facebook.
That is why I said "dressing it up" - is is a pretext for his primary goal.
It's to illustrate the hypocrisy.
The decisions Mark makes are more consequential than his private jet usage.
Pretty sure it's just Zuck haters trying to annoy Zuck.
Setting aside any possible agreements/disagreements with that, the flight tracking information is freely public, available to anyone who wants to look- go on flightaware. Flight information has never been private, nobody treats it as private, so why would social media* companies pretend it is? I don't think home addresses are that comparable in this situation.
EDIT: company name
I don't know. To me this feels the equivalent of having paparazzo permanently on your tail. I know, it's just a ultrarich person, they don't need our defending. Just feels like like a overkill method of accountability to make a tail visible and available for all to see all the time
Aircraft are (in general) required to transmit ADS-B information in the clear over RF that contains information identifying the aircraft.
Aircraft registrations are public. You can go to the FAA[1] and look up who owns what airplane and what their address is. Some aircraft owners choose to obfuscate their ownership through shell companies or LLCs.
Passenger manifests are collected by the FAA for airlines and charter flights, but they are not made available to the public.
So you can know who owns the plane that's flying over your antenna, but not who's on it.
1: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...
Yes, you could be "unlisted" (for a fee) but that was not really considered normal.
Now with it being digital it's too easy to casually find and abuse. The barrier to access is a lot lower.
(And, for the sake of accuracy, the yellow pages were a business directory that companies paid for higher profile ads. The white pages were the directory of individuals.)
And, newspapers of all sizes carried personal information in blurbs, such as "John Smith is in town for 3 days, visiting with relatives here."
However, when the Sexual Revolution kicked in, it became customary for women in the 1970s and later to conceal their identities in White Pages listings, and request listings of simply "J. Smith", if they were listed at all. Because otherwise, the White Pages were a good "shopping list" for obscene/prank phone callers.
- Safety (never know when you might get fame/notoriety)
Good thing people don't live on a plane, and ports (private or public) aren't just places you get to walk up to with a gun. That's all the information we get.
"doxxing" doesn't have a clear definition. It could mean anywhere between "posting personal information, however obtained" and "posting non-public personal information", which makes this statement questionable.
I'm not aware of any statutes in the United States that codify or prohibit "doxxing." Europe might have something to say on this matter, but in the United States, "doxxing" is just a colloquialism: it's not a crime.
Private companies are welcome to prohibit this behavior from areas under their dominion if that's desirable, but no civil nor criminal action may be levied against someone disclosing truthful, publicly-available information.