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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

So what you're saying is public information shouldn't be public and timely distributed.

Interesting.

So if I parked outside your house and every day when you left I followed you all day as long as you are on public streets or in public places and posted real time everyplace you went would you be OK with that? It's public information.

This is exactly what companies like Facebook do, online. Why do you think it's not OK to do this to the people who run such companies?

No, again, this is false. Facebook does not provide a public feed of my location or allow other people to do so against my will.

Whether you like Facebook or not, what they do at scale (tracking the online metadata of billions of people in order to generate ad revenue) is different in both subtle and obvious ways than following a single individual around in the real world from place to place. These differences are important.

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.

Not even close. You voluntarily give your info to Facebook and other websites/apps. Facebook and other meta companies have no idea where I am currently because I don’t use their products.

But you do use websites with their trackers, over time they've collected enough data to have a shadow profile of you. It's not accurate to the meter but they probably know the block you live in, some searches you have done in the past weeks, what news you read, what your taste in food, clothes, etc. are.

Unless you live in some jurisdiction like the EU and diligently refused to accept cookies on every website.

Plane owners voluntarily give their info to the public. If they didn't want the public to know where they are, they shouldn't be flying.

That's the typical reply from someone who doesn't have a life on Facebook, and it's nice for you but you can't extrapolate the lives of literally billions of people just from your own, singular example.

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.

> a life on Facebook a contradiction in terms

There are trackers everywhere on the web and websites regularly share the information they get with literally thousands of “partners” to build profiles on you. No matter how much information you avoid giving, it’s naive to believe they have nothing on you. There’s a reason laws like the GDPR exist, and it’s not because you always give info voluntarily.

> Not even close. You voluntarily give your info to Facebook and other websites/apps. Facebook and other meta companies have no idea where I am currently because I don’t use their products.

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).

I was responding to salawat's comment which has nothing to do with Facebook. They were implying that if information is public it is always OK for it to be promptly and widely distributed.

That’s not already public information. No one on the internet can use a public dataset to watch my location

Those datasets are not public because access to them can be sold for a lot of money.

Tracking a car is illegal. Tracking jets is legal for safety purposes. And this is pretty much a false equivalency unless these jets are now landing on Starbucks like a drop ship.

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 illegal. Tracking jets is legal for safety purposes

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.

Yes, the only reasonable way to track a car without stalking is to use a device, which is illegal.

And yes, you cannot attach one to a jet. But the jet needs to follow FAA regulations so we don't have to.

It's perfectly legal if you install a device the owners fully agreed to install and signed a 3-days long licensing text explicitly saying it that they didn't bother to read. Which is exactly what Facebook is doing.

You're describing the paparazzi. Yes - it's legal.

if you could be bothered to do it, go for it bro

It's the context that is important.

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...

That's a lot more defensible: Ohtani doesn't run a company that spies on billions of people. Zuckerberg does.

A specific address is very different from a port a plane lands on. And the public has a lot less responsibility than the press.

There's a big difference between this and tracking private jets: Ohtani couldn't use his house due to harassment from the papparazi and the weirdos who kept trying to jump the fence.

Tracking billionaires' jets doesn't stop them from using their jets for their intended purposes.

>There's a big difference

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 and Musk are not just ordinary citzens.

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.

I'm saying that certain kinds of transformations over public information can add up to private information, as they do in this case. There's plenty of other cases not involving billionaires where this is so. For example, property records and restraining orders are generally public information, but it would be grossly irresponsible if not criminal for you to join the two datasets and publish a live feed of everyone protected by a restraining order who buys a house in your city.

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