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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Why do people care about this? For what legitimate purpose does anyone need to be able to track the location of another person? Every platform has rules against posting people's addresses and nobody has anything against that, but as soon as this comes up people are worried about censorship.

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Tracking the person is a side effect, this is all about tracking the CO2 emissions and comparing to public statements that people made about that.

Or it's just interesting information that the person creating the tracking account can make some money off.

Two things can be true at the same time.

Do people honestly think the CO2 emissions of his private jet are consequential?

No - they think there's a palpable disconnect between the public environmental statements made by men like Zuck, and the way that they themselves behave.

It's to illustrate the hypocrisy.

They absolutely are.

I recall an article comparing CO2 emissions of private jets verses commercial airlines a couple of years back. A bunch of assumptions were made, but the rough figure was five times higher per passenger mile. When you consider that people who use private jets are likely flying more than those who use commercial airlines, and that individuals are being asked to make sacrifices for the sake of reducing CO2 emissions, then yes it is consequential.

Aviation contributes 2.5% of the global CO2 emissions per year.

The decisions Mark makes are more consequential than his private jet usage.

yes mostly kamala supporters

You can track CO2 emissions without stating where the plane is or was.

The stuff is gathered from public flight records, it's just the easiest way to present the data. Just like it's getting pushed back from you now it would get pushed back from climate change deniers saying we don't know how you computed it if they computed instead of just presenting a distance and accepting that the number is going to be a huge amount of CO2

I really doubt it's that noble. Those planes emit a nano-percent of all CO2.

Pretty sure it's just Zuck haters trying to annoy Zuck.

Wtf?! These accounts often link to shit like billionaires saying people need to use paper straws or set their AC hotter at the same time.

Give me a break. For every person that actually truly cares about this, there are a hundred people here that pretend to care because it gives them a high horse excuse to dunk on people they hate. I’d bet good money that almost every person here pretending the reason they care is the carbon emissions only thought of the carbon emissions after already being happy about the trackers and then seeing the parent comment giving them a proper moral high ground reason to fuel their hatred.

Conversely why does anyone care to keep their address private? There used to be a book that almost everyone had, updated every year, that listed the name, address, and phone number of almost everyone in town.

Yes, you could be "unlisted" (for a fee) but that was not really considered normal.

Personally it feels weirder to have my address public today because it's too freely available across the world. Sure, someone back in the days of the yellow pages would still be able to get to me, but it would probably involve a bit more work of tracking what city I'm in then getting their hands on the book.

Now with it being digital it's too easy to casually find and abuse. The barrier to access is a lot lower.

Oddly enough, the information is just as available to businesses today yet it is less available to individuals. The digital databases have existed for decades. Certainly longer than the Internet as a publicly accessible network. Yet the phone books, that were accessible to anyone, no longer exist. (I also believe that cost of phone books were included in the price of telephone service, which meant that they were "free" for most households.)

(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.)

City directories often carried more information than that, such as people's occupations, etc.

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.

- Avoiding unsolicited spam/ads

- Safety (never know when you might get fame/notoriety)

Internet ruined that idea. As well as a few high profile stalking cases. It's sad, but I'm sure it wasn't a surprise to various Sci-fi authors at the time.

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.

Airspace is a public resource and aircraft transponder data are not entitled to privacy.

Likewise, property records is a public resource (at least where I'm from), but it would still be considered doxxing to post someones address you found via public records.

>but it would still be considered doxxing to post someones address you found via public records.

"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.

What is "doxxing," legally?

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.

Yep. His plane is literally broadcasting "HI, I'M ZUCKERBERG'S PLANE" to anyone with the gear to listen.

The motivation for these accounts is usually a rift on the "ultra-wealth is bad" train.

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

Is the ownership information as public? Possibly it is, but the implication that specific people are on a given flight seems NOT public information. Or maybe the problem here is that these ultra wealthy people are wealthy enough to one a couple of planes but not enough to own so many that it would be hard to tell if they are flying at all.

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

The below applies to the USA:

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...

As far as I can tell the level of analysis being applied here is "Zuck is bad, therefore tracking his plane is good, therefore banning anyone who tracks his plane is bad."

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