Is flightradar24.com a security concern?

Note that the account wasn't about the location of a specific person, but rather the (public) location of a specific aircraft (own/used by a specific person). It's not like someone was tailing Elon and reporting their every location - planes must broadcast their location through use of ADS-B. It is public information.

> If you agree its fine, would you apply the same reasoning to [favorite politician]?

Yes.

Note that the FAA offers aircraft operators ways to make ADS-B information more private by vending a temporary ID for domestic flights.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy

Note also that FlightRadar24 and other ADS-B vendors are required by law to comply with FAA LADD, so airplane operators can request (demand, really) their information be scrubbed.

https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/security/privacy/limiti...

https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd

> Note also that FlightRadar24 and other ADS-B vendors are required by law to comply with FAA LADD

Flight tracking vendors that use FAA data are required by law to comply with LADD. Ones that run their own ADS-B networks and use no FAA data (e.g. ADSBexchange.com) are not.

Do you own a home? Would you like a social network that allows someone that doesn't like you to post your home address to millions of followers? Are sites like acris a security concern?

>Do you own a home?

Yes

>Would you like a social network that allows someone that doesn't like you to post your home address to millions of followers?

That's public data in my county whether I like it or not. Presumably that's where most of my junk mail comes from. It's annoying but I don't think it should be banned necessarily

That's against HN policy.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I thought so. A reasonable policy for a social network which was my point. Thanks dang

You mean like this service?

https://landtransparency.ca/

You don't get my point. Re-read my comment. Yes, sites exist that aggregate some public data. They are not necessarily a security risk. But blasting out data that may be public somewhere to millions of people who hate you is a security risk.

Another example of something like this is the mugshot websites that post your mugshot (also public!) and spam in out in hopes of getting you to bribe them to take it down.

Why is it a security risk?

Don't the people who actually want to harm musk, and have the means to make it happen, have anyway the means to get the information they need to find him? If it's mildly obnoxious like having to look up land records, they'll just do that.

I genuinely don't see how posting the location of his plane is a "security risk." I don't understand why he gets this added layer of consideration as a person in the airport. They got security at the airport. He lands behind it, same as anyone. He comes through it and his security is in his hands and the hands of the local cops, same as anyone. What's the deal here?

It’s a private jet, so he actually doesn’t have to deal with security at all and in most cases he won’t be close to the main terminal.

I think, to be completely fair, that the perceived security issue is more that we have a loose idea of what city he might be in. This feels more like a privacy issue than a serious security issue.

> Would you like a social network that allows someone that doesn't like you to post your home address to millions of followers?

I take it you are too young to remember phone books?

I think by virtue of of being a public figure, Elon can't have the same expectations of privacy as regular people enjoy by way of relative anonymity. No one really balks at the Pelosi's home being easily obtainable information.

> Do you own a home?

No.

>If you agree its fine, would you apply the same reasoning to [favorite politician]?

What, like Air Force One? https://twitter.com/USAirForceVIP

He has the best security detail in the world, but yeah, seems like an unnecessary security risk. I'm sure if a federal agency requested this bot be taken down as a security concern it would be a reasonable request. More reasonable that many other requests made under the veil of "security"

> I'm sure if a federal agency requested this bot be taken down

Which they wouldn't do because the secret service isn't stupid. They know that current location has very little impact on security. It is future movements that allow you to plan an attack, which are closely guarded.

The point is, I think, how you interpret "free speech". In his own tweet [0], he says:

"By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law."

The information @ElonJet is publishing is publicly available. One interpretation says: if it's publicly available information, then preventing it being republished is censorship. Therefore Musk is breaking his own rule.

Another interpretation says: whilst it's freely-available information, publishing risks increased harm to Musk himself. I'm no expert on US law, but I'd imagine there's some sort of provision that protects against deliberately risking harm to someone. Assuming that's the case, Musk is being consistent with his own rule.

Given his public profile - and his desire/willingness/record of being provocative - I'd imagine most will adopt the former interpretation.

[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?lang...

The current interpretation of the 1st Amendment is that anything less than "Fighting Words" (something that will “produce a clear and present danger of a serious intolerable evil that rises above mere inconvenience or annoyance”) the government can't interfere with. The delineated exceptions to free speech are obscenity (which is very poorly defined: the famous Potter Stewart line 'I know it when I see it'), child pornography (reasonably clearly defined), fighting words (defined above) or the related "true and imminent threat to violence or other lawless actions" (emphasis on imminent and lawless). Reposting publicly available data falls into none of those exceptions (after all, the government is the original source of this data!), so the government could not legally take this sort of action, here in the United States.

As an example of what a jury has found to be true and imminent threat, Flip Benham's Save America organization was printed up and distributed "Wanted" posters, with the names and home addresses of doctors who provided abortion services, and put the posters up on the homes and around the neighborhoods of the doctors. Things that don't rise to that level of threat are protected by the 1st Amendment against government retaliation.

Musk is, of course, free to not follow the guidelines that the Government is required to. But by the same token, we have free speech rights and are free to criticize him, make fun of him, and otherwise denigrate him for being a lawless hypocrite who is actively promoting evil in the world.

If "against their will" means "without their consent", one might never again be able to post a picture taken in a public place where faces were identifiable in the background.

Ordinary photographs constitute ample and often accidental documentation of where people were at any given time. Even if you assume consent (which is a real unfair assumption where people don't even know about posts being made about them), this would suppress a lot of information that is very clearly in the public interest; if I can get posts taken down that document I was doing a bad thing in a particular place, I have a lot of power to suppress evidence of my malfeasance.

The US's legal framework here makes a lot of compromises that make a lot of people unhappy, but if you dig into it, you can see why it's complicated: reasonable-sounding policies work their way to unreasonable results in various subsets of cases.

While I think things could have been done in a clearer and more above-board way, Twitter does seem to have an anti-doxxing policy that includes sharing non-public information about a person's presumed location. So a bot that crowdsourced a politician's location would seem to also be in violation of this policy.

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

I think that'd be a reasonable policy for anyone who isn't claiming to be a free speech absolutist.

If you make that claim and then enact censorious policies then you're plainly a liar.

> a bot that crowdsourced the whereabouts of [politician] at any time?

Oh my god. That would be horrifying. Can you imagine?

https://mobile.twitter.com/potusschedbot