The data is public. Does taking publicly accessible data and tweeting it make it creepy? Or is more a problem to you that all the data is public?

You could hide within this, say, you know, take a first class flight somewhere on a commercial plane. The price you pay for having your own plane is that your plane's movements are public.

I personally support all of this data being public, it's generally a great way to gain information on clandestine government activities.

The data isn't publicly available from the government because the plane is on the LADD list https://laddlist.com/aircraft/N628ts

Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.

I think there are legitimate questions about how and where aggregating crowdsourced data on people's movements crosses a line.

I am sure that allowing crowdsourced license plate reader data that makes a full history of every car movement public would be well across the line.

I am not so sure that this crosses that line but I think that discussion would be much more interesting than the low quality Musk bashing that seems to dominates these comments. (Edit: There are also some high quality comments that are quite critical of Musk that add information and context and deserve to be more prominent, but they are in the minority as the low quality comments are pretty prevalent and not being downvoted sufficiently.)

Given that the LADD list exists, we either need to repeal that law, make circumventing that law a crime, or make the the process for inclusion in the LADD list more rigorous and public.

The current situation where we are allowing companies to bypass privacy laws by using crowdsourced data seems like a bad precedent.

Beautiful response, thank you!

I briefly looked at LADD, very interesting mechanism for restricting data by filtering it from feeds. From the rest of your response, it seems like it’s perfectly legal to crowdsource this data.

I don’t really have an opinion about Musk etc, but know plenty of people do and will continue to argue.

To your point of a distributed network of license plate readers, this to me seems akin to what passive wifi/bluetooth scanning is doing, as well as the SDKs that beam your location to other entities. (there was a post on HN a year or so ago but i’m blanking on the name.)

I wonder if there is any legislation in the US for these operations.

Public data doesn't give you licenses to act unethically and immorally, laws are oftentimes poorly written.

Why is republishing this information unethical and immoral? (Your words)

It is doxxing as his plane's location is a proxy for his location, similar to his cellphone.

Also, it violates Twitter's rules about physical location sharing

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

Not really. There is no guarantee that Elon is on the plane. He could loan it to a friend or one of his companies VPs. The plane could be at it's home airport, fly to another airport to pick Elon up, fly to a third airport to drop him off then return to the home airport. Elon would have been on only one of the three legs.

Retract this statement, now that this crowdsourced data was used to stalk Elon's family.

KTHX

Uh..why? There is nothing false about it...

This whole article is about private information. The flight data is, as enough people already told you, not private information. For good reason.

Social Security Numbers used to be treated as quasi public data too.

He's not doing anything unethical or immoral.

invasion of privacy ?

What's in the plane is private, where the plane is isn't.

Twitter (and Musk) has access to pinpoint each of their users with the same precision, I feel it's a poetic balance.

whose, the airplane's?

This is all public information already. There is no invasion of privacy.

He is merging in public data and private surveilliance data from personnel at airports, and then publicizing it.

It is stalking.

You are either a free speech absolutist or you are not. The moment you start putting exceptions because you consider it "creepy", then your support of free speech is the same as what most of the population believes in: free speech with limits.

It's interesting that you would put this at your limit because this is free and public data.

I do not agree.

Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean I need to know your private medical conditions

Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean we need all potential targets of political assassination to have their schedules always publicly available with arrival and departure times with 10 digit grid coordinates

Just because I support free speech doesn't mean everyone should be able to track everyone else's cell phones, which are a proxy for a person's physical location

ADS-B data is public information. Anyone who wants to target Elon for whatever reason using this data does not need to go to Twitter to do it. Whereas.. private medical information is private.

Why on earth are y’all licking one of the richest people on Earths boots. The man is clearly using his power and money to stifle speech that that is critical of him. That’s not something that needs defending.

Elon's jet is flying around on public infrastructure. Airports, airspace, air traffic control, etc. Just like driving on public roads, you have no expectation of privacy if someone wants to sit on a street corner and write down every time you drive by.

The side effects of ADS-B have been really great in this regard. I love it.

ADS-B data on the LADD list is apparently not public information.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/adsb/pilot

It can be crowdsourced, and can be weaponized against individuals. The same way license plate photography can be used to track individual's cars.

Now that this data has been used against Elon's family, a series of retractions are in order.

Aren't you fully agreeing with how PP points out most people support free speech: free speech with limits?

His aircraft literally broadcasts this information through the sky. It's hardly tracking. And yes, we do it to everyone. Take a look at adsbexchange or flightaware.

Umm, we do do the same to everyone. Flight trackers use public data.

The only thing is that some sites remove flights based on whether they're on a list: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd

>But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.

Yeah, people are saying "it's public info about a public figure", but I'm pretty sure that we could imagine all sorts of creepy-yet-legal digital gang-stalking that one can do, similar to how doxxing is legal but nearly-universally frowned upon. Not to say that the account should have been banned, but I don't see this as just harmless fun like others seem to.

Sometimes I feel like these public figures should be tracked even more - like who has been on Epstein's flight / island and should get a hard drive check.

In theory the various intelligence services and the FAA have this information, but it's not acted on.

He took the company private to promote his politics. There have been lies about free speech for as long as there has been speech. Can we stop clutching our pearls over this reactionary being, gasp, dishonest?

What does this have to do with what I said? If someone had punched Elon on the street and I had said "hey maybe that's not cool", would you be posting this same reply? Must bad, therefore the gloves are off?

Ok I’ll reframe. The speech doesn’t have to cause harm under new moderation rules, it’s all this guy’s toy. Nobody is punching Musk not even with a fire extinguisher

And the private company perma-banned the guy.

Funny because the legacy content moderation did take harm into account and the new rules line is whether a rich dude takes offense.

>unless they are politically connected

You might as well say 'everyone'. Anyone rich enough to use, let alone own, a private jet is almost by default politically connected.

From what I've heard (I haven't searched for verification) hedge funds do watch private flights in an attempt to be ahead of merger announcements.

They probably do, they also use satellite imagery and AIS data to track cargo loading/unloading in ports and whatever else there is out there of data which might say something about the economy or specific companies or sectors or whatever.

How is it any different than paparazzi?

Problem here is that there are clearly free speech bounds, but Elon Musk has campaigned publically about being a "free speech absolutist" which would entail not curbing any form of speech.

You can always find compelling arguments for banning speech or forms of speech and we'll continue to draw and redraw lines as a society. But you can't go around claiming to have some absolute principle and then renege on it any time it hurts your feelings and continue to be respected. Can you think of anyone else who has their flights tracked? Are Bill Gates' flights tracked? Why do you think that is?

Also being a public figure means that you lose some amount of privacy. If he doesn't want all this drama he could just stop talking and being a highly prominent public figure. Now we're just going to get a flight tracking website instead, probably with new features.

I think there are at least two problems with your alternative argument, if not more. The first problem is Elon Musk is politically connected and operates in the public sphere as a highly political person. The second problem is that there isn't anything that prevents people from tracking other rich people like they do Elon, except that nobody cares about what they do because they don't do things like buy Twitter. If you want a change I think you have to make private flight information unavailable, but until then I don't see any real problem with it. Stop flying a private jet if you don't like people posting where you are flying to and from. There isn't anything that prevents someone from reporting everywhere I go except that nobody cares. Hell, I self-report it on Yelp.

We're all Libertarians aren't we. Your arguments aside, Musk said he would not ban this account because he believed in the free speech issue. So he's a liar and a hypocrite. May I ask what drives you to use your free time to run to the defense of a billionaire, who has the most popular social media tool on planet earth at his disposal?

The account clearly doesn't violate the NAP so it's libertarian-approved.