rosnd

>Even companies like FlightAware and FlightRadar24 rely on hobbyists to receive this data.

Businesses blatantly operating in violation of EU laws might not be the best example here.

>ICO's guide to the UK GDPR does have a specific example of cars being identifiable[1] - "A vehicle’s registration number can be linked to other information held about the registration (eg by the DVLA) to indirectly identify the owner of that vehicle." Nothing about planes though.

Car registration numbers is a very common kind of data for businesses to handle, of course it makes it on the list of examples.

Same is not true of planes, of course they don't make it on the list of examples.

>[2] covers car registrations and explicitly discounts company owned vehicles from being PII - "The registration plates of commercial vehicles are not personal data of an individual as the vehicle is owned by an organisation."

>All of Ol' Muskie's jets are owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a shell company.

This doesn't work, you can't wash off PII by tying one aspect of it to an organisation. My phone line might belong to a business, but that doesn't give the carrier a free pass to do whatever they want with associated location data.

> Again, this is public data

It isn't! These are ephemeral radio transmissions which contain PII. You might collect those transmissions and publish them somewhere, but that would be illegal.

> nobody has been able to successfully make a case that aircraft movements are cases of indirect PII in terms of the GDPR.

So you're just trolling. That's not how the GDPR works, you don't get to make any kind of case at all. The government will when they eventually get to it after clearing decades worth of backlogs.

And for what it's worth, there are already perfectly applicable precedents https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-851

That tangent was regarding the data sources used by the twitter account.

The elonjet twitter has nothing to do with anything, it's just a bot reposting adsbexchange.

>GDPR does not apply to the movements of aircraft, not even private jets.

It sure as hell does, just like it applies to movements of cars and movements of mobile phones.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

> Nope, you can get an SDR dongle and track planes all you want all the time even in the EU

For example in Finland you would likely be violating the radio secrecy laws by merely listening unless you're actively involved in aviation (e.g. flying a plane or sitting in a tower)

In all EU countries you would be violating the GDPR if you stored this data without a lawful basis. (If you're wondering what constitutes "lawful basis", here's a helpful tool https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/gdpr-resources/lawful-b...)

> I doubt the EU courts would argue any other way otherwise we'd need to criminalize tracking of UPS trucks and the like

Why would the GDPR prevent UPS from tracking their own trucks? How is this even remotely related to what we're discussing here?

Relatively easily? Even if your business has zero presence in the EU, other businesses handling money for you likely do.

US company using Paypal to accept money from US persons? Paypal has presence in the EU and will hand your money over.

You don't actually have to worry about any of this stuff, if you have the money to buy one of these you also have the money to register it in a third country.

>It’s relatively impractical in most of Europe because they’re not allowed to fly above populated areas except to take off and land (at least in the US)

FWIW this is mostly a US problem.

In Europe it's not always legal to listen to unencrypted radio transmissions if you're not the intended recipient, but this is heavily country dependent and not rabbit hole worth diving into here.

But what's definitely not legal anywhere in the EU is to record unencrypted radio transmissions, use it to construct a database full of PII, and distribute it like Flightradar and friends do.

E: can't reply below due to ratelimits

>Hence why I said "in the US"...

Hence why I said "in Europe"...

ADS-B transmissions are not "public data" you can look up, what you're referring to as "public data" are datasets of dubious legality from the likes of flightradar24 who operate ADS-B logging devices around the world.

For example, in Europe what they're doing is strictly in violation of the GDPR.

What adsbexchange, flightradar & co. are doing is almost certainly illegal in Europe under the GDPR.

This isn't exactly "public flight data", in many cases it's illegally collected and published flight data.

E: I can't reply to "imnotjames" below thanks to HN ratelimits, but here you go:

It's an obvious GDPR violation, just like it'd be an obvious GDPR violation to publish a similar database but with phone IMEIs and associated locations instead of aircraft.

>It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.

This is certainly not true in Europe, and in the US there's generally zero restrictions on publicly sharing any kind of PII.

Why would the public need to know which plane is where, as opposed to just a plane being somewhere?

>How do they ever even lose?

Lack of motivation. Relatively few people on the prosecution side truly care about winning, especially as time passes.

Cases can easily take years, personnel changes ruin everything.

If you have money and aren't accused of anything totally crazy, you can easily completely ruin the governments chances by simply getting a few of the main people involved private sector jobs. This happens every day.

> Does having [...] Chichvarkin [...] in London hurt anyone?

Dirty bad evil russian money was invested into wine, driving up prices?

HN doesn't attract many DDoS attacks, most websites don't attract any DDoS attacks.

Historically HN has not been hosted on infrastructure that would be particularly resistant to DDoS attacks, nobody has been DDoSing it.

Why do you believe that this has strengthened dictatorship? The obvious conclusion is exactly the opposite, moving money out of dictatorships to the UK weakens dictatorships and strengthens the UK.

London real estate is expensive because it's highly desirable, most people buying it up are not using funds derived from criminal sources.

It can be true that a pragmatic relationship with "dirty money" has played a role in making London as desirable as it's today, but that would be a success story rather than a negative side effect as you suggest.

Like what?

>This argument is like “what about the minors who want to date middle aged men?”

To be fair, the Nordic countries tend to be very accepting of such cases.

> This highlights that most women in prostitution are not there by choice, but because they are forced into it.

What about the men and women who are in prostitution by choice? A friend of mine is a SWer who drives a new Bentley, should she sacrifice her life of luxury to help less fortunate colleagues?

Well yes, the people writing prostitution laws tend to fail to even consider the existence of male prostitutes.

As long as we're talking about regular laser pointers, at worst this mildly inconveniences the pilot.

There have been tens of recorded cases of this every day for decades in the US alone, but not a single recorded accident.

The idea that someone could meaningfully endanger Elon by pointing a laser pointer at his private jet is pants-on-head crazy. What next? Oil slicks on his driveway? Perhaps slowly poison him by idling a car in front of his house? Second hand smoking?

Binance delisted USDC in september, since then the only way to "purchase" USDC on Binance has been by requesting and USD withdrawal via USDC.

For some fairly absurd definitions of "endanger", yeah.

I'm not convinced "that sucks" is a reasonable way of describing what essentially amounts to people transferring vast amounts of wealth from an ostensibly unfriendly state to the US. This seems like something US authorities ought to encourage.

That's correct.

Thanks to always great Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press/SDNYlive for sharing this.

#1 source for anything SDNY https://twitter.com/innercitypress/

So, a seaplane then? SBF could presumably even afford to bring in a decent submarine, assuming he hadn't lost access to his money.