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.