My question here is whether there is actually a rule here and whether that rule will be followed, or was it just done capriciously because Musk didn't like it.
I have my guesses, of course, but I haven't checked if they are true.
But he isn’t.
This has absolutely no meaning and has no parallels to surveillance of private life.
The police would find that useful, but courts haven't always been favorable: https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/court-south-carolinas-...
Since it was an individual not linked to a website, it's an even easier decision for him.
flightradar24 tracks jets. Go ahead and see if you can figure out where Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison is from flightrader24. You can't unless you know the jet number they happen to be using.
@ElonJet is effectively tracking Elon and broadcasting that, and only that, information to the whole world.
In theory you could track Elon yourself by correlating public info (figuring out which jets he owns and using flightrader24) but it's orders of magnitude more effort and I don't see how "you can figure it out" justify "publish it to the whole world".
Of course I can't. It would be illegal.
Not because of disingenuous "car has a right to privacy" logic but because any judge would conclude that by tracking a car you're tracking the owner of the car and the owner does have a right to privacy.
Similarly, if the name @ElonJet doesn't give out the purpose: the account is tracking Elon by way of tracking his jet.
Morally speaking, the justification for transparency of jet location was to track them in order to increase safety of flying.
It wasn't to enable tracking of rich people.
It's legal but it's a loophole.
And somehow Elon hate completely overshadows the fact that the guy running @ElonJet account is an asshole.
I think you'll find that it has far more to do with directly interfering with another person's property without permission. If you publish someone's coordinates by using publicly accessible traffic cameras or (cost considerations aside) flying your own news helicopter around, the arguments become a lot vaguer. It's not clear that there's a legal/constitutional right to privacy in the US, and indeed recent supreme court decisions about abortion seem to reject the notion; jurisprudence in the 1970s saw an implicit right to privacy in certain constitutional provisions, an idea which 'originalists' regard as BS.
But Musk had previously called out specifically this account as one that he would not ban (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456). So, whether or not he has a right to ban it, this represents a reneging on an explicit commitment.