That's the whole point: this is all just a figleaf, Elon Musk has a long history of going after people that show him up in every way possible. Next up: the lawsuit. Wait for it.
Heh, Ok. Checked that box. Very predictable though. Pity that he won the case against that diver. If he had lost that one it might have saved us all a lot of trouble.
He's being inundated with explicit death threats even more than usual, and usual is a lot*. Leaving the Twitter account up, and those like it, but delaying data by 24 hours is a sensible compromise and the policy applies to everyone's physical safety.
No one asked either of them to be public figures. They can go away whenever they want. Their status is not an immutable law of reality and humanity tends to have a history of not giving a toss about being helicoptered by self aggrandizing individuals.
The data is available real time by law elsewhere. He’s not routing around anything, just trying to insulate himself from consequences of his actions, and cement his genius by flailing around like the party drug using, half wit he actually is.
By Elon making the statements that he did against Fauci and claiming he should be prosecuted, by using his bullhorn he instigated the attacks against Fauci. When you are a powerful public speaker it should be that you consider more carefully what you say in public, because you can influence people to make rash judgements.
Compare this situation to when McCain responded to that woman during his presidential campaign who said something along the lines of "Obama is a scary Muslim" and McCain showed himself as a man of true honor, saying "No, he's a good man, loves his family." and maybe said something like [I disagree with him politically but he's not a dangerous threat].
They didn't "fall back" to Facebook. ElonJet has been on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and Truth Social this entire time. And as of 7 hours ago Mastodon.social as well. [1]
I am fully expecting this thread to be swarmed by HN users claiming this is a righteous upholding of principals and Elon Musk is a pure man free of hypocrisy, with only the thickest skin. Wont stop me from being mad about it, though.
Let's be honest - he owns the company and he have every right to do whatever he want with it including burning it all to the ground. So he could just ban that account to begin with and everyone would just learn that Twitter is now his private fan club.
Instead he given some empty promises about "being free speech absolutist" and "not banning account that track his private jet" just to do exactly that shortly after. It's hypocrisy and he should pay dearly for that with what reputation he still have.
The problem he's going to have to contend with is that you can't be a partial free speech absolutist, especially not when all the exceptions have to do with your own person. It puts the lie to most of his statements on the subject so far. Not that there was any doubt.
Actually, the new policy against live-tweeting people's whereabouts (with the obvious exceptions) and enforcement of a 24h delay would have been pretty easy to defend, had it preceded the account suspension rather than the other way around.
But it was clearly a last minute deal with no accounting for things like talking about public speakers, concerts. And talking about such things is a big part of what reporters do. So now they can add and judge who is a legitimate journalist. It opens up entire new cans of worms.
Aren't the public govt data feeds of the actions of notable public figures public events? Define public event? If I see him going into safeway to buy some cheetos is that public?
A rule of "don't piss off Elon" is much more honest and easier to follow. It's really not a big deal either, most Twitter use cases don't involve Elon at all -- all it takes is Elon losing face about the free speech thing.
It's trying to be both ban-everything-elon-dislikes while letting Elon claim Twitter is a full free speech zone that makes it entertaining. Trying to make rules around how Elon is feeling that day, and probably how high he is at the time of the pronouncement is always going to make for ridiculous results
Seems to me that the reputational damage comes from the amount of money these flights cost and their carbon footprint. That part would be difficult to defend someone wanting to hide.
The information is out there already, but this practice goes a step further by shining a spotlight on a person (and their children's) locations.
People would have a different attitude if this guy's niche was live tweeting female celebrity's locations instead of billionaires.
“live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available”
This makes “I am at <concert> watching <performer>” a violation.
"Content that shares location information related to a public engagement or event, such as a concert or political event, is also permitted." Literally the next sentence in the thread linked.
It happens in public, but it isn’t a ‘public event’ by any reasonable interpretation unless Elon encourages people to come see him disembark the plane.
Actually, he’s celebrity, having deliberately sought the spotlight for years. That also means he has a lower reasonable expectation of privacy than a normal person, much like other celebrities and public people.
"Use of the national airspace is generally considered public information because pilots – whether airline captains or recreational fliers – rely on a system of air traffic controllers, radars, runways and taxiways, lighting systems and towers that are all paid for or subsidized by taxpayers.
As a result, flight data collected by the FAA in its air traffic control system – except for military and sensitive government flights – is public information. Web sites such as FlightAware post the data online, allowing anyone to observe the system and follow most planes virtually in real time."
Which is not to say that Elon setting foot onto the tarmac should be open to the general public - but the very fact that airports are restricted spaces makes this kind of information more comfortable.
That doesn’t make it a public event, the sentence even gives examples of what they consider public events - concerts and political events.
I’m not arguing about anything here except for Twitter’s new policy. I don’t think it’s a good policy and it makes the lie of Musk’s “commitment” to free speech but it says what it says.
Right -- that word "event" is a huge deal here. I'd guess it makes Twitter's newest policy under Elon its, by definition, most restrictive speech policy to date.
I wonder how does Elon expect any journalist to follow these rules? Big chunk of information from press is reporting on public figures location and sometimes this include reporting in real time.
According to these rules journalists are no longer allowed to publicly share information about Elon going to visit his Saudi creditors since it's wont be public event. Nice!
Yes. According to Twitter policy there must be "24 hours" delay since it's only way to follow "not same-day" rule. This will obviously makes Twitter useless for any news reporting.
Any social network post from celebrity X who mention they just seen celebrity Y on a private party of celebrity Z? According to Elon this information about him cannot be shared on Twitter.
PS: I'm not exactly into US celebrities, but I'm very much into stalking Putin and his cronies using OSINT reporting on Twitter. Now anyone who publicly share their movements can be banned.
Maybe not a technical violation since it said "earlier today" -- but a random student tweeting the same right after seeing him on campus would get the account suspended?
A fan saying "OMG, just saw Kanye at the Whole Foods in El Segundo" would be worthy of suspension?
News stories about various public officials secret trips for negotiations would be worthy of suspension?
Or just posting that you ran into your good friend Bob this morning and roughly where would presumptively be in violation, Twitter would have no way of knowing whether Bob consented for that information to be published.
Before coalition talks in Germany there are frequently news about politicians visiting this party headquarter or that party headquarter, practically always in real time. All of those are usually not public events. There are no press conferences, nobody in the press is told about those visits (except if it leaks).
> Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.
Seems like the rules would allow journalists to share a story reporting if Elon Musk visited any Saudi creditors, but if they include the location of the meeting in their reporting then they wouldn’t be allowed to post it on Twitter until after the meeting.
Well, in the next hour, a journalist is going to get banned, a campaign will come up to get them unbanned, and Twitter will change the rule. We'll be fine.
I mean, I have a hard time finding issues with 24h or 7 days delayed journalism for small news. If you’re covering war, or the government, or something of public utility I can understand a live coverage tho
It's not about militaries since military planes mostly have their ADS-B transponder off. But OSINT community depend heavily on flight trackers and also on sharing location information with wide audience.
It's possible without Twitter, but bans for sharing of location information will make it much easier for Russia to block investigator accounts.
OSINT accounts provide detailed information on a number of global conflicts, not just the ones that get covered in the media. And the level of detail and analysis is almost always better than what you get in the mainstream media.
It wasn’t clear that parent was referring specifically to military OSINT and I took it more as general OSINT which is often of civilians, and can be less ethical and lead to false conclusions.
It's a hastily-written rule designed to ban Things Musk Doesn't Like while allowing things he does. See also the exception:
> In addition, you may not share private media, such as images or videos of private individuals, without their consent. However, we recognise that there are instances where users may share images or videos of private individuals, who are not public figures, as part of a newsworthy event or to further public discourse on issues or events of public interest. In such cases, we may allow the media to remain on the platform.
So vague it's impossible to determine in advance what's allowed and what's not.
So is Hunter Biden’s private media now banned again? Maybe not, as long as “Twitter” decides it is newsworthy (but in such a way that Elon’s media or location is not)? My head is spinning.
Man, I wouldn't want to be in the team of lawyers charged with writing this rule.
"You have 24 hours. You have to write some rules that make my private jet's flights that are public information available on a public website in real time disallowed, while also making Hunter Biden's hacked nudes allowed. Go."
If that person didn't want their location shared, they should be able to request the tweet be deleted. Multiple offenses against your account? I'd say yes, bannable.
In principle we would turn off the user flags and software penalties, but the thread quality is so wretched that I see no upside. I'm shocked, and I don't shock easily after 10 years of this.
Those two things are unrelated. Discussion that breaks the HN guidelines is destructive, whether or not it's tech related, because it pushes HN in the direction of going down in flames. Preventing that from happening is the #1 job we have.
Arguably the default fate of internet forums is to eventually burn out and become scorched earth, but the idea of HN from the beginning has been to stave that off for as long as we can.
They missed the 'Boss someone did something that is ok by all of our rules, in fact the ones that you yourself set and publicly announced but that are probably going to upset you'.
As the once-upon-a-time moderator of a very large website this list reads all too familiar. Thanks for posting it!
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok."
Such a slipper slope for a guy who announce during TED talk, he is okay with all freedom of speech and leave it to government to decide aka if something is illegal then it should not be under free speech.
It is 24 hours now... what about in the future breaking news at Musk conference will require 10 years space.
Also the whole idea of doxing him... is he special or not? Otherwise we should not track anyone's flying info... but then government keeps this data open. Funny, the government turned out to give you more freedom of speech than a private company!
This seems like a reasonable policy to me, especially when involving stalking well-known people (as opposed to taking a selfie with my mates at Micky D).
The problem is, that Elon very publicly and explicitly promised that @ElonJet would be allowed to continue as it is. His words mean less and less…
People keep saying this but I have never found it to be the case for me. I meet and collaborate with amazing engineers on Twitter, and often get help with tricky problems. I have also had a lot of success using it to spread the word about my own projects.
Yep. I wonder what went on behind the scenes there. I'm sure the next owner of Twitter will be happy to share all that in 'The Twitter Files'. They'll also be a lot more interesting than the present installments.
Maybe the booing in person and Dave Chappelle's comment about the booing being pending civil unrest spooked Elon a bit. His right wing shit posting on twitter reaches a lot of people and many dislike him for it.
I've been seeing a lot more people posting about boycotting Tesla and associating ownership with his views. I drive a Tesla and frequently people bring up Elon to me. I usually just tell people I don't like/care about Elon but I like the cars Tesla makes.
I don't want to support this guy in any way shape or form. The damage he's doing is rapidly undoing any good that he's done so far and he's on the expressway to net-negative territory.
I'm sure you have a point though: to step out of his bubble of yes-men must have been a cold shower.
Seems a bit of a stretch to blame the creator of elonjet for a stalker being able to find his car. The flight information is public information. Even if it wasn't and/or he flew commercial, people would probably be posting about where they saw him due to him being a public figure.
He should make up his mind about this 'free speech' thing and then stick to whatever decision he comes up with for at least a couple of months. This is beyond silly.
Yeah... if he really cared about anyone else's personal safety other than his own, he wouldn't have fired the twitter safety team, and then not said anything about a former twitter executive.
Elon mostly cares about Elon and the rest of the world are cardboard NPCs to him as far as I'm interpreting all of his actions for the last two months.
I don’t even think it was particularly about his personal safety. So someone gets a notification he has landed in Miami - are they going to race to the airport, hop the fence, run to his plane and confront him?
I genuinely think he just found it irritating that someone was trying to make him look bad. I don’t blame him, I’d probably feel the same way. But then I haven’t bought a social media platform and loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that I am a free-speech absolutist.
Unless Elon plans to ban the FAA from doing its job, people will know where Elon Musk's airplane is at all times.
Banning a silly Twitter account that copy/pastes data from the FAA won't change a thing.
The paparazzi have been using these things to follow celebrities since forever. It's an exorcise in ignorance to ignore the nature of FAA regulations / airplane tracking.
> It's an exorcise in ignorance to ignore the nature of FAA regulations / airplane tracking.
It may be more of an exercise of Elon flexing his $44B investment over the heaters and the poor people: by this point he knows that anyone even slightly left of center is not going to love him, so he's full on embracing the far/alt right crowd by "owning the libs". "Free speech" is lip service at max that some people fell for hook, line, and sinker.
Well that’s the other thing - banning the account on Twitter doesn’t make this go away. It just means people will follow them on FB or just use flightradar24 instead.
Exactly. A thread on Twitter about his Jets wouldn't touch his personal safety since the data is public, but it would attract more among the people who don't like him, therefore he would be giving exposure to discussions against his public image.
He has all rights to ban whoever he wishes since he owns the platform, but common sense should suggest him to stop talking about free speech since he's in no position to lecture anyone on the matter.
> Banning a silly Twitter account that copy/pastes data from the FAA won't change a thing.
Of course it does.
When you make something easier to do, the effect is it increases the chance of people doing it.
If your contact information is listed in a telephone book, it is publicly accessible information. Anyone can look that up. But who's going to do that? (to prank call you for example). But if some posts your info to a twitter account that reaches millions, chances are someone's going to call you. Why? Because popped up in millions of peoples' twitter feeds. And since it's so low effort, one or more people with nothing better to do will call.
> So someone gets a notification he has landed in Miami - are they going to race to the airport, hop the fence, run to his plane and confront him?
Even if congress shutdown ADS-B receiving or encrypting it somehow, people would just get out the long range camera lenses and take pictures of the tail numbers as the planes land and report it on a web site.
ADS-B is used all over the world, the trend is actually in the opposite direction: more and more airspace requires the use of ADS-B. Encrypting it would defeat the purpose of allowing airplanes to see each other as well (ADS-B to some extent replaces radar).
Congress could presumably pass some law but it would have to be ICAO or some other global organization that would formalize the change. Updating the systems on all aircraft would take many years. The current roll-out has been in progress for more than a decade.
These are repeated so often it's mind-boggling. Somehow we're supposed to believe that 1) The team before did nothing, and 2) That the new team, which is not team at all and possibly doesn't even exist, IS doing something? How do either of those make sense? But it's acceptable to so many people because pedophilia is the new Satanic Panic.
Not true. They censored that stupid H Biden lap top story _including in DMs which thus far had supposedly only been used for underage illicit material_.
He said in multiple tweets theres still rules particularly with direct harm to people. Idk why you would think doxxing and tracking someones location (which in this case they stalked his family) would be ok. I feel like this is just a talking point even though you and others know better but just dont like Musk. If thats the case just say it.
As for me liking Elon Musk: I used to. And then somewhere along the line it changed and now I in fact do not like him. But my liking or not liking him has nothing to do with simply holding him accountable, he made some pretty expensive statements and he fails to live by them, even for a very short period. And conveniently just when he's decided to ban that account a stalker of his family pops out of the woodwork. I'm sorry but Musk has lost the benefit of the doubt with me, too many lies over too many years.
Why would he tweet “tweets about my location posted on a delayed basis aren’t that bad” then an hour later ban it again? It’s very odd and throws gasoline for his detractors.
This is after very publicly saying he would stand up even to people posting his flight info just last month.
I get being emotional about the kid being stalked but the mixed signals are just frustrating.
The link between his kid being stalked - assuming it even happened - and deleting the account as well as his previous statements on the subject simply do not add up. This could have happened at any point prior to him taking over Twitter, but it didn't and now, magically, within 48 hours of the discussion around blocking the account blowing up there is the silver bullet. I'll read the police report if and when it becomes public (again, assuming there is one, which presumably there should be).
Edit: an upthread comment states that the owner of the elonjet account says that the account has not tweeted since Dec. 12th so that the two can't possibly be connected.
If your contact info was listed in a public white page directory, would you be okay with someone looking up that publicly available info and posting it to millions of people on twitter?
Elon’s contact info was not shared publicly with millions of people. The location of his private jet, which is public information, was republished on Twitter.
Most of us have the ability to drive to someone's house. Most of us do not have the ability to intercept a flight or gain access to the secured area of an airport.
If I am using my real name, and if I am aware that my address is publicly listed, why not? If I worked in an office and made that information public, would I be expected to be upset when someone publishes the address of that office on Twitter?
Now, if I'm pseudonymous, that's a different matter: someone would be revealing my real name's association with that pseudonym, which may be a problem.
As far as billionaires go he’s way more amusing than Bezos and Gates and Buffet all put together. Only Bankman-Fried has been close on the entertainment front.
A king is only as powerful as his subjects are loyal. If someone transitions from being amusing to being a train wreck, what is offered in return for the people to continue to recognize such power?
Also doxed a Tesla short seller on Twitter and tried to get him fired. Also lied about some other person looking into Tesla and claimed he ran over employees in the parking lot, taking him to court.
Vern Unsworth is a cave diver who assisted with the Thai cave rescue a few years ago.
He was derisive of Musk, who wanted Tesla engineers to help rescue the trapped children.
Musk responded to this criticism by calling Unsworth a "pedo" and "child rapist" and hiring a private detective to investigate Unsworth. Unsworth ended up suing Musk for defamation.
Flawed is liking pineapple on pizza, not using your platform of millions of followers to call someone a child rapist. That's worthy of contempt to me.
You can admit Elon is extremely petty and short-sighted in private personal matters but admit he still attempts to do good in the greater scheme. That's where I'm at personally. I despise his lack of consistency and restraint in his position of power, but still respect his wider goals in reducing censorship and making bold investments in technological moon shots.
I'm cynical though, I only see lesser evils as all you can wish for in politics and culture. Trusting in politicized public figures = pure disappointment
The most sympathetic scenario re: twitter (ignoring the other Musk issues around FSD/pre-Twitter stuff): a few very public examples of him censoring people for petty reasons VS pre-Musk twitter banning (or silently shadowbanning) many thousands who happened to fall outside the current-thing Overton Window, using equally or worse biased/misguided reasons (ie, 'misinformation') and quietly taking requests from gov/intel agencies... still a net gain over all. But tons of work to be done.
This kind of "flawed" seems like a perfect reason to strongly distance oneself from any past suggestions of "being a fan" (everyone makes mistakes after all), but to each their own.
I don't know anyone these days who is the model of morality. People are pretty messed up in general. I think at least Elon puts most of his energy into doing things that are good for the planet and people.
Everyone has issues, and does bad things from time to time. But I respect that he's been able to build the companies he has while enduring almost constant hate from the beginning. He had some supporters but CNBC and the like were constantly talking about how Tesla would go bankrupt and how it was a total waste of money.
And I think Elon does some really dumb things but in general I want him to succeed on what he is doing.
He's just speed running all the decisions and problems the last lot faced. They started with anyone being able to say anything too, and then spent 10+ years finding every exception and complication to that policy.
I think he and quite a number of people who wave the "free speech" banner are pretty consistent here. Anything the ingroup says comes under free speech. Anything the outgroup says is a shocking imposition on the freedoms of the ingroup.
It fits pretty well with Musk's "woke" obsession. He should be able to do and say whatever he wants. But if he gets booed in response, then "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters". Because the booers couldn't possibly be equal humans using freedom of speech to express their feelings.
I think even if his private jet went completely dark and no updates to its location were posted anywhere this wouldn’t have changed anything here. If this happened (who knows, maybe it did) knowing where the jet landed or took off doesn’t allow you identify the location of any of his children or ex wives/partners
The person who’s trying to fashion himself a free speech liberator while being a capricious egomaniac who invents transparently post-hoc justifications for his selfish hypocrisy on a platform with world changing impact and expects the same world to just accept his manufactured reality because he’s used to getting his way… yeah, that seems important to me.
So is any tweet that includes the location of someone else now free game to take down and potentially ban?
"Paul Pelosi said something very interesting when leaving the SF court house..."
Well so long as it's no longer the government asking him to censor things that aren't illegal and ban people they don't like, it's a private company so I don't see what the problem is.
It's only a problem if you want Twitter to survive as a platform where they at least try to uphold something akin to free speech. If you want it to become irrelevant then I guess it doesn't matter, and there is no problem. But if Elon says he wants it to be a place of free speech and he doesn't behave in a way that backs that up according to public opinion (which is highly subjective) then there will be some issues retaining users. Really it seems like an impossible task.
Indeed I gave Twitter a second chance because of this and this
makes it doubly hard to defend. I already cared little about defending the cult of personality thing.
Why would you have to defend anything like that to use it? Who makes any of the products or services you use? Do you defend the Chinese Communist Party when you buy anything made in China or by a Chinese company? Or defend petroleum and war profiteers and petrostate regimes whenever you fill your gas tank or take a flight or a bus somewhere?
I was defending the ideas he was pushing not defending Elon himself. All I’m saying is it makes it harder to defend free speech when people get to pretend he actually doesn’t really care about free speech because he makes occasional/rare exceptions to the rule for his own benefit.
Obviously it’s still way better situation than quiet censorship for everyone outside the Overton window and via gov request Vs a small very public group of cases for a billionaire’s petty exceptions to the rule, but it’s not helping the cause in the culture war pushing for censorship.
Okay thanks for the answer. That's interesting, I can easily defend free speech regardless of what anybody else says or does.
And so far I think the direction he's taking Twitter looks very promising in injecting some diversity into the social media landscape and shaking the government-corporate attacks on speech. Maybe not very much and may be futile in the long run with a meek subservient populace who beg to be ruled, but certainly better than before.
Agreed, the lesson from this for most Elon defenders is probably stick to your values and don't blindly defend celebrities.
The lesson for others to not be hysterical and look at the bigger picture of the net gain of reducing censorship (and the fact Twitter was already an ideological disaster that can either only get better from here.... or die - win/win) is probably going to hit a brick wall.
They have their own ideological battles to pick. And Elon handed it to them wrapped in a bow. So they might as well take the victory lap.
I don't think banning of real time broadcasting private peoples' location and travel is all that bad. And if applied consistently regardless of political ideology of the broadcaster and the target, really isn't the death blow to free speech on the platform that people are trying to make out it is.
It's not quite the anything-that-is-not-illegal that Musk was blathering about (although it's possible it could run afoul of stalking laws in some countries/jurisdictions), but it's really nothing compared with the politically motivated and government involved censorship and banning that had been going on there.
I believe they're referring to 2020 when two political campaigns were asking Twitter to remove stolen data. Of course, only one of those campaigns qualified as "the government" at the time, and many other organizations also make requests to remove stolen data, but I don't think they're using reason.
No I was referring to government agencies pressing for news to be censored and journalists banned by knowingly lying about certain stories being misinformation.
Having it show up automatically on your twitter feed is different from have to know bout and intentionally use a tracking platform to look for a specific person's plane.
If you are nuts enough that you want to shoot that person's plane, motivation is there to click on a link you can find in a minute of searching on Google
Meanwhile, half the bots I've blocked still show up in my news feed (when it loads and I check, both of which have diminished greatly in the past few weeks)
I find the tabs on the Explore page return errors about 20% of the time. Also, yesterday Trending was offline for an hour or so, and random keywords like Telegram were blocked and then unblocked [1]. It's about as broken as you'd expect for a company that just lost ~70% of its headcount.
I think we can all agree that celebrity stalking via plane tracking apps ought to have been prioritized above all the other safety issues Twitter is still fumbling around on ineffectually.
Of course spouting a load of nonsense about former Twitter employees to the point that they have to evacuate their home is perfectly ok by that same token.
“Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and his family were forced from their home after Elon Musk’s tweets misrepresented Roth’s academic writing about sexual activity and children.”
“Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and his family were forced from their home … according to a person familiar with Roth’s situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity”
Forgive me if I don’t give the Washington Post’s vague reporting and anonymous sources much credence. There are zero details here, and no claim of independent verification other than repeating the hearsay of an anonymous “person familiar” — not even a direct source.
How has this story been verified? If it was verified, how were they “forced”? Under what circumstances, specifically?
The article makes clear more details are not given for safety reasons, which is appropriate given harassment has occurred.
You can dismiss mainstream press if you like, but the point is it’s not a HN commenter being hysterical or equivalent to subreddit speculation: this is reported news.
According to you then, you either believe in Musk way more than in Washington Post, or you must think that reasoning of Musk is also such a fabrication. Neither seems to me a well reasoned position with the current information available.
What does that have at all to do with posting the already publicly available location of his jet? Seems like a pretty obvious attempt to play on people's emotions and shut down any kind of rational thinking to cover up for Elon just banning people that annoy him.
That's pretty much what happened[0] (given the PIA situation with changing plane numbers mentioned elsewhere in the thread), with the only difference that the person camping out and watching out for the plane didn't do the stalking of the car ride afterwards themselves. They just reported the data on the flight landing, it got publicly updated on the tracker, and then another person (who actually approached the car later, according to Elon's claim) stalked them using the info posted on the tracker.
[0]. Assuming the allegations about it happening are true.
Nope. As previously stated many times in this and the other discussions, the aircraft is not part of PIA and the accurate hex code is reported on the FAA site.
ElonJet didn’t tweet anything on the day this incident occurred, so that part is false too.
Sure, I am not claiming that this is what happened. My explanation of how it could easily work relies on the assumption that the aircraft was a part of PIA and that the events described actually happened. If his aircraft wasnt a part of PIA and the event never actually happened, it obviously all goes out of the window.
The link is weak but because you can track the plane you can wait at the private airport terminal and wait for the guy to walk out the door. There's very few people that go in and out of those terminals so it's easy to just wait for the person in question. Once they're out you can then follow and tail their car.
There's very few people that go in and out of those terminals
In Los Angeles there are hundreds of private flights per day, and wealthy people pay for hangar space. It may well be possible to stalk someone this way, but I don't think it's such a foregone conclusion.
It's also conceivable that a very wealthy person with a flair for hype and dramatic gestures would stage an event as a demonstration or object lesson; we know of celebrities who have done just that is a misguided attempt to solicit public sympathy.
I am not suggesting this has happened; it's just one of numerous possibilities, and I point it out to point out that it's no more irrational than other plausible allegations.
And? Literally everyone else runs this same risk who uses an airline. Maybe if home boy doesn't want to get tracked, he should stop using a means of locomotion where every flight plan is a matter of public record.
Zero sympathy here. I'm actually more upset that there appears to be a "hush hush, pay to anonymize" program, and that it isn't rolled out as a default. Billionaires do not deserve exclusions from the baseline risk profiles everyone else endures.
Yes except for the part where it's a car not a plane and some random LA road not an airport. Except for these things it's a perfect match, grateful for this context. Although this "Elon Musk realizes he is not alone on planet" arc is quite interesting.
Depends on which airport you're talking about. Difficult for LAX, but very, very easy for SMO (and since we're talking about a private jet, it was probably SMO and not LAX).
Welp, guess we better set up a license plate anonymization program...
Law enforcement says NO! In the distance
Guess that's that.
Welcome to being a trackable number Elon. Remember, it's all in the public interest. Also, It's funny how billionaire's pander to this type of surveillance in the Board Room, but suddenly start trying to throw off the bit/yoke when it starts to inconvenience them personally once somebody is sufficiently motivated to start leveraging the data trail they all are instrumental in maintaining.
He owns car dealerships, why is he keeping a car long enough to require license plates? Like content moderation, his predecessors already figured that out.
Is there an archive/screenshot anywhere of the posts from the ElonJet account immediately before it was removed? I'm curious what recent info (if any) it showed.
Tesla's implementation is materially different in that it's not optional and cannot be trivially disabled.
Early Onstar vehicles are trivial to disable and later ones can still be disabled by removing the radio transceiver. The vehicle operates normally without it, unlike a Tesla.
Yes, otherwise it would be unusable by anyone living in a city, given that underground parking (esp multi-level one) tends to have no reception at all. Not even mentioning driving through countryside stretches on road trips.
The only things that won't work with no cell connection while you are in the car are things like spotify app in the car (but you can still use spotify through the car bluetooth connected to your phone, if you preloaded the songs on your phone) or being able to see live stats of the car in your phone app.
Sure. There are fleets of automated license plate readers, there are patents about tracking serial numbers broadcast by tire pressure sensors, etc. States sell their entire drivers license databases as well https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-pri...
I find it odd that his son would be traveling in a car with no dashcam and the only video from the whole incident is some guy sitting in the driver's seat of another car looking very relaxed. Also that there's no mention so far of any police involvement, as I'm fairly sure the LAPD would take a violent incident report by professional bodyguards as something worth looking into.
I don't know if it was even a Tesla car, but if it was they're sorta famous for having cameras out the yin-yang, I've seen lots of 'vandals caught by Tesla security cameras' puff pieces.
They added them in a software update at some point in 2019. It gets recorded to a usb drive that you keep attached. Any drive works, I personally prefer an external ssd.
When you press the record button, it dumps the past 10 mins of video from 4 external cameras onto the drive. When the car is fully stopped, you can either watch the video on the screen inside the car or unplug the drive and watch it on your laptop or on any other device that can read from usb/external drives.
There is also an automatic (aka sentry) mode that triggers dumping a video by any nearby action, but that's only when the car is parked and left unattended.
Just because information is publicly available doesn’t mean it’s not doxxing. It’s the act itself. Otherwise every accusation of doxxing could be denied with a single level of indirection.
Exactly. Just because information is publicly available, doesn't mean it's easy to find or access. Doxxing makes it easy to access and reference, and bridges the gap between a pseudonyms and real identity
No, the bar for “doxxing” is whether you’re disseminating private or sensitive identifying information about a person, and particularly if you’re doing so with malicious intent.
Given my real name — which is available on Twitter — my home address is not difficult to obtain from online, public, governmental real estate records.
Despite the fact that the information is public, it would still be doxxing — not to mention inappropriate, violating, and frightening — if someone decided to dig up that address and post it to a broad audience on Twitter that would have otherwise been unaware of it. This is even more true if that audience is hostile, and my information is being posted in an attempt to harass and/or intimidate.
It helps if you use a word if you use the common definition of that word.
If you want to expand the definition of the word doxxing then that's fine but you'll have to have that conversation all by yourself.
I'll just use this one:
"Doxing" is a neologism. It originates from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation "docs" (for "documents") and refers to "compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone".Essentially, doxing is revealing and publicizing the records of an individual, which were previously private or difficult to obtain. "
I’ll just use this one, from the first paragraph of the very same page you cited:
> Doxing or doxxing (originally spelled in 1337 as d0xing) is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregration of this information from public source or record databases and social media websites (like Facebook), as well as the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means such as hacking and social engineering.
So this is doxxing, and you dishonestly cherry-picked an incomplete definition. In case any confusion remains, here’s the Oxford Languages’ definition:
> search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
There is nothing 'personally identifiable' about an airplane, it's a plane, not a person.
Posting your home address which you've kept out of the public eye is doxing, posting the whereabouts of any aircraft that broadcasts that information to all receivers is not. That's why you can find this information all over the internet, the only place where you currently can't find Musk's jet is on Twitter. And that's before we get into his free-speech arguments which apparently were a bit inconsistent.
Or would you like to accuse the FAA of doxing as well?
Yeah I don't understand this at all. If I told you right now that I'm arriving at LAX in 1 hour you still have no chance of finding me, and it's transient, I'll be somewhere else private very soon.
I don't see how it's any different from a public figure saying they'll be attending any public event.
How far out of the public eye does your address have to be? I have filed a few patents and I run a company, and both of those put my address in prominently searchable public records. If you dig a little deeper, the deed to my house is a public record accessible through a 15-year-old website, and going even further, you can do a credit report on me and find all of my past addresses.
I know people wish this weren't the case, but your address isn't exactly private information. Anyone can find it easily for anyone else.
That's true. But if you were to for instance publish that address with a call to action or if you were to compile a list of addresses of politicians with a call to action you'd quickly end up on the wrong side of the law. That is doxing. Merely looking up someone's address used to be a matter of looking in the phone book. And people that did not want to be in the phone book had unlisted numbers.
So the bar for doxing is definitely a low one, but in this particular case it isn't met. I can see why Musk is irritated that that account exists, even more so because it didn't go away at the first request by someone as powerful as him, and that makes it personal. See the whole saga with that diver for a typical response. But that doesn't mean that the person manning that account is doing something illegal and that is the bar which Elon Musk himself set not all that long ago, and which is what makes this news.
If he had been a bit smarter about this he would have just said: "I'm irritated by you, this is my site and you're gone". That would be that. But now there are all these logical pretzels why this is illegal and all that other stuff that people - and Musk - do on twitter is not because 'free speech'. The two are incompatible, and he knows it.
Sure, it always helps if everyone can agree what the subject matter is, but at its core the issue isn't whether behavior X fits someone's definition of doxxing, it's whether behavior X is illegal. Something can be illegal but not doxxing, or doxxing but not illegal.
And in the case of Musk, secondary issues arise, such as the fact that in the US lawsuits can be commenced for almost any reason, and how Musk's tremendous wealth, power, and social influence allows him to hold others hostage to his whims and malleable ethical positions.
It isn't illegal as far as I can see and it isn't doxxing as far as I understand the term. It isn't classy either, and I wouldn't do it but whoever operates those accounts should be free to do so under the rules that Elon Musk set himself a few weeks ago.
The main criterium for Twitter rules changes appears to be whether or not Elon is personally inconvenienced. Which is fine by me but then he should drop the 'free speech' act and stop pretending that he understands the degree to which the former team managed to eke out the closest workable compromise on uniting free speech whilst still having a legal and functional website. That coin does not seem to have dropped yet.
Principles such as absolute free speech only mean something if you uphold them even if you are personally inconvenienced.
I agree, except to add that I unfortunately don't think Musk's principles are very different from most people's, in that it seems that most people only care about their own free speech and are completely fine with the speech of their ideological opponents being repressed.
Very true, but most people don’t brand themselves as “free speech absolutists” and make a big public spectacle about how their position is morally superior to all others.
Fair, I should clarify: it is not illegal in any of the locations that Musk or Jack Sweeney operate in. Musk going after Sweeney would hopefully get thrown out at the anti-SLAPP stage. Unfortunately, my go-to person for such questions (@popehat) just left Twitter because of how awfully Musk is running it.
> Every person who, with intent to place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family, by means of an electronic communication device, and without consent of the other person, and for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment, by a third party, electronically distributes, publishes, e-mails, hyperlinks, or makes available for downloading, personal identifying information, including, but not limited to, a digital image of another person, or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person, which would be likely to incite or produce that unlawful action, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail, by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
Despite Musks claims, there's zero evidence that Sweeney has ever done anything with intent to place someone in fear for their safety. And, given that it operated for years without issue, there is in fact compelling evidence to the contrary.
I mean, I never said what Sweeney was doing is considered doxxing, or whether his behavior could lead to reasonable fear for safety. I'd rather let the lawyers untangle this annoying mess
really didn't expect my initial comment to lead to a shitstorm...
If we're to believe that information that is technically public can be "doxxing" if not widespread, then if I post about a party at my house, and then you share that post with lots of people who want to hurt me, that's doxxing and a violation of that law.
> LoTT re-uploads video content
This is not at all what LoTT does. That's what the LoTT TikTok did, but it was banned on TikTok. Current things that LoTT twitter account is posting about are:
- Yoel Roth
- A drag queen event at the white house
- A number of videos and images of drag queens that were not posted by the performer
- Taylor Lorenz
- etc.
And was repeatedly suspended from twitter for (incorrectly) claiming a hospital were doing hysterectomies on kids, resulting in bomb threats at said hospital, and then doing it again.
"re-uploading content users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing" is a misrepresentation of the account.
You are the one misrepresenting here. Someone involved in censoring a sitting US President is newsworthy by any definition as is someone who accepted a very public invitation to the White House.
Taylor Lorenz doxxed LoTT (not even debatable here with the article even being edited to remove some of the doxxed links). Speaking about this and the public journalist who did it to you certainly seems appropriate.
As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
> Over the 3-year study period, a total of 204 gender affirmation surgical cases were identified: 177 chest/top and 27 genital/bottom surgeries (Table 1). Most cases were masculinizing chest reconstructions 177/204 (86.8%) with 65/177 (36.7%) of those patients being less than 18 years of age.
> The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.
> You are the one misrepresenting here. Someone involved in censoring a sitting US President is newsworthy
Whether or not they are newsworthy or appropriate, information about Roth and Lorenz clearly isn't "video content the users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing". If you want to change your argument, feel free, but don't accuse me of misrepresentation and then lie.
Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
> As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
No I was not. A hysterectomy is not a chest surgery, and the hospital doesn't provide them to children (https://archive.vn/7R44e). The hospital may provide some services to children, but hysterectomies aren't one of them. Again, do not misrepresent my comments.
> Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
I'm a bit confused by this.
I have just checked Libs of Tiktok's Twitter feed and only found two tweets referencing Yoel Roth, one bemoaning the fact that LoTT is receiving threats and that if it were Roth it'd be national news[1], and another[2] from November the 4th flagging a tweet to him and wondering why it is still up.
Where is LoTT doxxing Roth?
As to the stuff circulating about Roth, it was all public to begin with, right? I certainly don't wish any threats to come his way but that's threats and harassment, not doxxing. Maybe I missed something.
And more, all recent. You're correct, I guess that I should have said "harass" not doxx, but yeah there's tons of stuff LoTT is doing to stoke harassment at Roth (like imply he's a groomer: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1601778632552484865)
I'll be frank and say that I don't find any of that to be harassment nor inciteful of anything but opprobrium, and I do find some of his tweets shown to make it easy to question his position. I think the tweet about whether students can consent is being unfairly taken out of context (the article it's from[1] is fair and not anything like the way it's being portrayed) but some of the other tweets and his PhD thesis… the criticism are valid (to be made, not necessarily correct).
Still, no one should be in fear because of their legal speech - that makes it unfree - whether that's Roth or LoTT or Musk or anyone else, but I don't see that those tweets would be liable for that.
I don't know if the tweet qualifies as harassment, but it's certainly making entirely baseless allegations that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types.
By using heterosexual, non-paedophilic women as one end of the spectrum, and paedophiles at the other, we can see that indeed, such statements by the former would raise no eyebrows. Such statements by the latter would raise eyebrows. That's because of context/prior behaviour.
Roth has a lot of tweets that would provide context that invites raised eyebrows, especially given his PhD dissertation, and his behaviour as head of Trust and Safety, where he suppressed the #groomer hashtag, and given an overall context where people of Roth's political persuasion are hyping up drag queens dancing for children and he's actively suppressing criticism of it. That's so easy to explain.
I also might add that women have a biological urge to give birth and take into account the male's skills as a father. To say that (some or all) gay guys have this may be true but it seems a stretch, and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM? At the very least, his tweets are utterly stupid and reckless. If a headteacher tweets "wow, women are hot but women holding babies, extra hot!" wouldn't you pause? How about if he tweets out from his main account "I have a secret dirty twitter account", you wouldn't raise an eyebrow? Please.
As to "that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types", firstly, that could be said of anything, though we do have another spectrum, running from (to a reasonable person) non-threatening through marking out undesirables to directly threatening. The marking can lead to actual threatening situations, like before a genocide, but they also overlap with valid criticism, and since we're not in a genocide situation I struggle to see how the tweets in question reach that bar. Find something that says "we should kill paedos" from LoTT and you'll have a much stronger case, otherwise you've taken up a position where you're arguing against someone who's against paedophilia, simply because they're a political opponent. That's how this endless cycle continues.
You are basically just saying, in a long winded way, that it’s ok for straight women to be attracted to straight men holding babies, but it’s not ok for gay men to be attracted to gay men holding babies. It’s a strikingly clear case of homophobia. One could more easily believe that it was unintentional on your part if you hadn’t written your third paragraph trying to justify it with back-of-an-envelope evo psych.
> and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM?
At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
> You are basically just saying, in a long winded way, that it’s ok for straight women to be attracted to straight men holding babies, but it’s not ok for gay men to be attracted to gay men holding babies.
What a strange way to misinterpret something long winded. Should I have written more for you, or do you think that your preconceived notions would render that effort as moot as it is now?
> At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
b) He was writing about letting underage children onto Grindr for some nebulous reasons around that time:
> accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
I can think of better ways for teenagers to connect than a hookup app. Can't you?
c) American date format is idiotic, I'm not interested enough to decode them all, perhaps you could do it for me as you're so precise with what others have written.
I would love to hear your 'better ways' for queer teens to connect with each other. In general it is much more difficult for queer teenagers to meet each other (especially in more rural or conservative areas) than it is for straight teenagers. From the age of 16 I certainly made use of the internet to meet other gay people (in the early 2000s). While there are certainly risks associated (as indeed there are for adults!), one has to be realistic about the availability of other options – some of which may be considerably less safe. To me, it seems quite a sensible suggestion to have properly vetted apps that teenagers could access without lying about their age. This would probably make people safer on average than the status quo, where teenagers still use dating apps designed for adults.
>a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements', so you will have to check this for yourself.
>What’s wrong with Twitter? Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat... Mastodon?
Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you. This seems like a fairly basic point. If you're living in a small town, you're not going to be able to easily find other queer people near you on any of those apps.
But why do you think that teens will be magically be safer on Snapchat or other such apps? This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
>Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
> But why do you think that teens will be magically be safer on Snapchat or other such apps?
Because they're not full of men explicitly looking for hookups.
> This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
Yes, it's not that Roth was making an argument indistinguishable from what a paedophile might write, nor that if he'd said it about heterosexual children and Tinder the same logic would apply, it must be that everyone against him is bigoted!
You already tried that earlier on in the thread and it sounded just as desperately idiotic then given that it required completely missing the example given of the headteacher, or just noticing what is obvious.
Rather than seeing bigotry where it's convenient - or claiming you see it - try reading the arguments put to you and coming up with something that is cogent.
> > Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
> In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
It's not, but again, if it's inconvenient to answer then don't.
> Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you.
Users on all those apps have bios and can share their preferences and location, all the apps have search. You managed to meet people with less apps, less people on the internet, worse search etc. If there's a real need for this, someone can build it. As Roth himself points out, there probably isn't, but then he skips on to letting children into Grindr formally. Is noticing non sequiturs also bigotry? Do let me know.
If you’re correct that Snapchat etc. can be used to search for nearby queer people in the same way as Grindr, then that only goes to undermine your argument that teens will somehow be safer on one than the other. However, AFAIK, none of the apps you mention make it possible to search by sexual orientation. This makes them fairly clunky as a means of meeting queer people in your local area – especially if you are not in a large urban area.
The irony here is that you seem to basically agree with Roth. That is, you are fine with gay teens meeting each other via apps, but think that these apps should be age appropriate. For some reason you seem to think that Grindr is super scary, even though people do the exact same stuff on it (chat and share photos) that they do on Snapchat, Insta, or any number of other apps used by teens. An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting, would probably be *safer* than many existing apps. Snapchat, for example, will happily let you send nudes or other explicit imagery that can could quite easily be automatically blocked in the majority of cases.
By the way, if you think that Snapchat isn't full of 'men explicitly looking for hookups', I have news for you...
> By the way, if you think that Snapchat isn't full of 'men explicitly looking for hookups', I have news for you...
There are lots of blokes who like porn on Twitter and on Pornhub but to say that they're the same because of that would be an enormous stretch.
> An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting,
No, Roth suggested that Grindr allow minors and be made age appropriate, without giving any details of how that would work. Those two things, like Twitter and Pornhub, are not the same thing.
> If you’re correct that Snapchat etc. can be used to search for nearby queer people in the same way as Grindr,
Again, not the same. You can find what you want via search but apps like Grindr and Tinder are optimised for meeting people nearby for hookups and dating.
> that only goes to undermine your argument that teens will somehow be safer on one than the other
What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr? If you're on Grindr, can others find you too, and is that easier than on Twitter?
> Roth suggested that Grindr allow minors and be made age appropriate, without giving any details of how that would work.
Sure, he didn’t give any details of how it would work, but it’s not that hard to imagine what kind of changes you’d make (e.g. automatic blocking of explicit images, stricter moderation of language on profiles…). This was just one paragraph of a thesis, so I’m not sure what your point is re the lack of details.
> apps like Grindr and Tinder are optimised for meeting people nearby for hookups and dating.
Yes! That was exactly my point. Gay teens want to date just like straight teens do, but it’s less easy for them to find suitable people on regular social networks.
>You can find what you want via search [on Snap]
What makes you so sure? I assume you don’t spend your free time searching for gay teenagers in your neighborhood on Snapchat, so what is your basis for this assertion?
> What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr?
I don’t know about twitter, but it’s certainly pretty high on Snapchat or Insta. A restricted version of Grindr could potentially impose much stricter limits on under 18s interacting with adults than any of the major social networks do.
> This was just one paragraph of a thesis, so I’m not sure what your point is re the lack of details.
A thesis isn't somewhere anyone worries about needing to cut words to fit a limit, quite the opposite, and yet he leaves us hanging with something that sounds questionable. Much like his tweets, that one about getting a crying infant mixed up with the sound of porn comes to mind. Defending that is not a hill I'd like to die on.
> > You can find what you want via search [on Snap]
> What makes you so sure?
Roth says so:
> While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat.
There's a reason why the majority of young gays are using those instead, just as the rest of us use general networks too.
> > What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr?
> I don’t know about twitter, but it’s certainly pretty high on Snapchat or Insta.
It seems the search works okay then. What is the relative chance you'll find a teenager vs an adult when searching for a teenager? (On a service that is for general users vs one stocked with over 18s)
> A restricted version of Grindr
Just why? If I knew some straight kids that were finding it hard to date, my advice to them would not be "hey, perhaps you should try adult hookup apps", or upon finding out that children like to sneak into adult spaces "you know what, we should just make it safer for them". No, they should stay out of adult spaces and adults that argue for their introduction should be questioned as to what on Earth they are thinking.
"You know that place where guys and gals go to meet?"
"Like clubs?"
"Yeah. You know that sometimes there's underage girls there"
"Of course. Got to be careful."
"You know what we should do to keep them safe, let them in!"
Try saying that amongst any group of blokes I know and you'll get called a paedo immediately. Maybe jokingly, maybe not, but no one's writing a thesis about it and expecting to get away with it. Except for academics, apparently.
Youth clubs are a thing, no? So I think your analogy makes exactly the opposite of your intended point. We do provide analogues of adult clubs for young people so that they can meet each other in a safer environment.
The thesis wasn’t about creating dating apps for queer teenagers, so that’s why he doesn’t say much on the subject. Remember that this paragraph was picked out by people desperately trolling for anything that could be used to smear him. You seem to suggest at several points that this thesis is entirely about young queer people (“no-one’s writing a thesis about it”), but you’ve been misled on that point.
The rest of your post is frankly too much of a mess of mischaracterization to respond to. (To take only the most egregious example, I think you must recognize that Roth does not say that Snapchat is good for finding other queer people in one’s local area in the section you quote.) You’re becoming so oddly insistent on Snapchat’s utility as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app that you’re even undermining your own implied conspiracy theory. Why would Roth even care about luring young gay guys onto Grindr if he can find legions of them in his neighborhood on Snap? Snap already allows under 18s.
> Youth clubs are a thing, no? So I think your analogy makes exactly the opposite of your intended point
In my analogy, Roth is arguing that we allow children into adult nightclubs because they sneak in, not that we have separate clubs for them.
And it's I, not Roth, who already argued for "youth clubs". To quote myself “If there's a real need for this, someone can build it.” He makes no such pronouncement.
There's only 3 choices for where to put young people:
1. general apps
2. adult-only apps
3. youth-only apps
He made the case for 2, I'm anti-2 and suggest 1 or 3. Very simple, try to keep up.
> The thesis wasn’t about creating dating apps for queer teenagers, so that’s why he doesn’t say much on the subject.
I don't care. He writes just enough to be questionable and not enough to be defensible.
> You seem to suggest at several points that this thesis is entirely about young queer people (“no-one’s writing a thesis about it”), but you’ve been misled on that point.
As I wrote above, I have a copy of the thesis, I haven't been misled, you've just continued to display a wilful inability to read my comments.
> The rest of your post is frankly too much of a mess of mischaracterization to respond to.
And yet you do. This will be fun and ironic.
> You’re becoming so oddly insistent on Snapchat’s utility as as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app
That's weird because I've barely mentioned Snapchat. I've mentioned it once myself, and as a general app, not as "as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app". You have have mentioned it 10 times. Hence, every other time I've mentioned it has been quoting you.
Do you actually read the responses you get?
> you’re even undermining your own implied conspiracy theory
We're talking about Roth, a single person, there cannot be a conspiracy. I can see now why you reacted so strangely to the use of "pronouncement". Please, pick up a dictionary and use it.
> Why would Roth even care about luring young gay guys onto Grindr if he can find legions of them in his neighborhood on Snap?
I can think of several reasons why someone sexually interested in under 18s would want that:
- convenience
- self selection by the target demographic
- plausible deniability
- grooming
More difficult on a general app. In addition, when he was in charge of moderating a general app, he suppressed use of the word groomer. So many strange coincidences.
But that would be to miss the point as badly as you are wont to do. The point is, it seems perfectly reasonable to question his pronouncements and behaviour.
> I can think of several reasons why someone sexually interested in under 18s would want [to use Grindr]:
- convenience
- self selection by the target demographic
Great, so you can see its utility for queer teenagers then (who as a general rule are likely to be sexually interested in people around their own age).
As a general rule, all people are statistically more likely to be interested in people of their own age so that general rule is unsurprising.
I can also see the sexual utility for underage girls and boys if they let underage girls and boys into nightclubs but I wouldn't advocate that as nightclubs are adult spaces. Same goes for Grindr and Tinder et al.
Is what you're proposing a common position amongst gay men?
We do let teenagers into nightclubs for other people in the same age group. See e.g. this (admittedly old) article: https://www.cypnow.co.uk/other/article/youth-nightclubs-club... I don't think these sorts of events are particularly popular, but that's more because teenagers don't seem to be especially interested in them rather than because adults object.
>Is what you're proposing a common position amongst gay men?
What is it that you take me to be proposing? Also, whatever it is, how would I know if it's a common position among gay men?
Or is it that you're just dogwhistling "Are all gay men pedos?" – in which case, the answer is no.
What he wrote about was how to deal with teenagers using Grindr and other networks already.
"While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults."[1]
No, what he wrote - and you’ve so helpfully provided the quote - about was allowing teenagers to use those apps formally, with some illogical argument about general purpose platforms.
There’s a reason gays use Grindr, because they have a sexual preference and want to meet others with that sexual preference for sex. If they wanted to just chat they could go on Twitter and, you know, chat with anyone - gay or not - because it’s general purpose. Is it difficult to find gay people on Twitter?
If some bloke starts writing that we should let young girls on Tinder because they already use it and, god forbid they could just use Twitter for a chat, it’s too general purpose, they need a hookup app for interaction, feel free to label him a paedo too because that’s what it sounds like.
Neither Lorenz nor LibsOfTikTok would admit they intended to cause fear. But posting someone's contact details is not normal nor does it serve a serious public interest.
Sweeney isn't on the same level at all. He's tracking jets. Airports are full of security. The last time Internet posts led to an attack on an airplane was never, unless we're counting al-Qaeda's private message infrastructure.
You don’t have to attack a jet in the airport. You can attack a car on the only road from the airport for example if you know exactly when and where to attack. (Also, not all the airports have good security, smaller airports don’t.)
> You can attack a car on the only road from the airport for example if you know exactly when and where to attack.
Was this the case with the stalker? From what I can tell the airplane landed the day before, and I haven't seen any evidence that the incident occurred near the airport.
I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps up, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
IANAL so correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like Musk has a decent chance of getting SLAPPed back [1] to kingdom come.
Twitter may be a private entity but the lawsuit is clearly meant to stifle the distribution of public information. Now that he owns one of the largest social media platforms used to distribute stuff like CALFire emergency announcements, that jet information is not only already public but arguably that information is now in the public interest
It would depend on where the lawsuit is filed. Anti-SLAPP statutes are state laws, and vary wildly by state from very strong laws, weak laws with almost no teeth, to no laws at all.
Unfortunately this means enterprising billionaires might be able to forum shop the SLAPP lawsuit to states where it’s less likely to bite them later.
Sweeney is a college student in Florida and the alleged incident happened in California. I’m guessing Musk is based out of Texas? CA > TX > FL according to anti-slapp.org grades but all three have anti-SLAPP laws. Sweeney might actually have the hardest time in his state because the laws are weirdly specific.
IANAL and genuinely curious, how much further can Musk shop around? To the state Sweeney’s corp is in (if he has one)? Does some random court in Kansas or whatever have the jurisdiction to slap a meaningful injunction against someone who’s never stepped in the state? I doubt Musk would be able to actually recover any funds that way but again IANAL and I’m curious. Can he make this federal?
Musk is literally trying to sue a twenty year old college student. Might as well try bleeding a rock. Is Musk so out of touch that he really thinks that he can get anything but a pyrrhic victory?
What Musk would get is more of what he's already getting: causing pain to the target and fear to others. Whether or not he eventually loses the lawsuit doesn't matter for that.
Again, I’m asking about the jurisdiction which decides whether Sweeney will have anti-slapp to defend him. If so, Musk’s case can get dismissed with prejudice at the first hearing and the courts in some states will even fine him for wasting everyone’s time.
Yes, thanks, I'm aware, and I'm saying that an anti-SLAPP statue is insufficient here. Might the process be shorter? Yes. Might Musk have to pay attorney's fees? Yes. Is that enough to render Musk's threats harmless? No. Is it enough to dissuade Musk? Also no.
Getting sued by Musk will hopefully be a less giant pain in the ass than without an anti-SLAPP statue. But it still could be quite painful. And just the threat of the lawsuit is pain on its own and may have a chilling effect on both the target and others.
Yeah, ouch. I had thought the legal process could be terminated sooner but the defendant in the first case study Hill v. Heslep et al still had over $100k in legal fees (which they were awarded after winning the anti-SLAPP motion), though that seems to have had a complicated second prong due to California’s new revenge porn laws.
I hope Sweeney opens up a legal defense fund and Streisands Musk to victory.
If Musk sues I would happily throw money into that pot to defend Sweeney. Though, if he sues in a state with a decent anti-SLAPP law, I would also expect plenty of lawyers willing to pick up the case pro-bono, and only try to get paid out of awarded legal fees.
It would be a worthy cause, a very high profile case, and (depending on the jurisdiction) a not-insignificant chance of recovering fees. I'd be willing to bet Sweeney won't have to front the cash for his defense. But, again, if he does, it's a pot I'd throw some money into.
Even with the knowledge that the doxxing is leading to stalkers endangering not just the wealthy target but also his young child, you would fund the doxxer?
That’s pretty monstrous.
If there is a kidnapping or murder down the line, your money will have helped enable it.
Donating to a doxxer with the knowledge that their work has already played a role in leading a stalker to the target’s young child is monstrous. Full stop.
Do you have any evidence at all that there exists any sort of connection between the flight tracking and the incident with the car?
To my knowledge most cars don’t have tail numbers, and don’t register their flight plan with the FAA, so I don’t really understand the connection you’re drawing.
Responding in good faith does not just mean that you stand by what you write. It also means that you respond taking the person you're replying to at face value, without omitting important context or exaggerating the situation. Claiming that the other party is "monstrous" and saying that they'll have blood on their hands is in no way appropriate here, especially considering that:
* The discussion is in a thread about SLAPP, with the point of contention being that Elon is suing to intimidate rather than for damages
* Elon has, in the past, implicitly and explicitly demonstrated approval of such activities
* It is unclear whether the information led to the attack
That, plus that fact that the money is not going to run the account directly, but pay for legal fees in the court case.
There's a lot of discussion here on all these topics. Ignoring them completely and jumping immediately to a conclusion that lets you call someone a horrible person is not reasonable or responding in good faith. You can make your point and disagree without lowering the quality of discussion.
You are not responding in good faith yourself. There is a clear and obvious distinction between calling a stance monstrous and calling a person monstrous. The GP did the former and I don’t think it was ambiguous — but even if it was, it is in bad faith to assume the worst interpretation.
Yet again you are not responding in good faith. You defend your own admitted bad faith as a “misstep” but the other person’s alleged bad faith as “with intent”. Surely this is textbook bad faith.
I don't think so. The comment I responded to showed up in a thread of more than a 1000 others talking about the very things I mentioned. If you don't assign any intent here it's just someone cruising over the entire context of this conversation, picking a side (without any supporting evidence for why they chose their interpretation, mind you), and then using it justify making a fairly extreme comment. And then they extend it even further into "you know this could also lead to a murder so now your actions support killing children".
If any of {"the information is public/protected under the First Amendment", "Elon is suing to harass this person", "Elon is just straight up lying about the incident", "the attack has nothing to do with the account", "this is something Elon actually said he supports in the past"} are true the point being made changes dramatically. I don't think any of them have been settled at all. I'm sure 'AlchemistCamp has opinions on them as do I but in situations like these it's generally appropriate to make comments taking this uncertainty into account. Like, it could even be a curious comment, "it seems like this person's account is actively harming Elon's family, why would you possibly want to send money to fund it?", but as it stands right now it just jumps immediately into making the conversation worse.
On the flip side, I feel the problems in my comment, which I freely accept (…though not as bad faith), do not actually significantly alter its meaning. Nor do I think it ignores surrounding context like the comment I replied to did. My point was "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person's actions" and I wrote "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person" and I feel that this is something a reasonable person could end up doing, even if it's obviously not correct. Perhaps I'm missing what led you to focus on that part in particular, rather than the rest of the comment, where I feel the meat of it lies?
Both your initial comment and the first paragraph of this one are so uncharitable to me that it’s difficult to respond but here goes:
1) Contrary to your initial claims, I made an ethical criticism of a a behavior not a person (and even explicitly clarified this in a sibling comment)
2) The discussion about SLAPP was an off-topic tangent to the primary conversation of the account suspension and the security risks the anti-doxxing rule addressed
Bringing the discussion from the tangent thread to the primary topic is an improvement, not a worsening of the discussion.
3) Your implication that I “cruised over the entire” context of the thread of more than 1000 others comments to make snap posting is false on two counts. There were fewer than 1000 comments at the time and I actually had read over a hundred and already commented elsewhere first.
4) My position isn’t even close to extreme. Funding someone who is regularly de-anonymizing and broadcasting people’s real-time location coordinates against their wishes, despite being fully aware that doing so presents a security risk is morally reprehensible to many, many people—an important bit of context you yourself seem to have worked hard “to ignore”, in your own terminology.
You’ve made repeated made long-winded, meandering complaints about my critical 3-sentence comment, but at the least you’ll have to grant my comment didn’t make untrue assumptions about the other poster’s process of reading the thread, their frame of mind, their good faith in approaching the discussion, their reasoning process or their opinions.
I criticized only the specific course of action the commenter said they were planning.
We have the benefit of hindsight on this particular incident, which I think strengthens my point: it seems very likely that Elon was being purposefully misleading about the circumstances surrounding this incident, that they did not actually endanger his child, and that the ElonJet account had nothing to do with Elon's encounter with this person. I think it is reasonable to say your comment was on topic. However, I strongly disagree with your characterization that you "brought the conversation back on topic". Considering that there was already evidence on the day this was posted that Elon was acting with intentions other than genuine concern for the safety of his child, I think a "is Elon trying to get rid of an account he doesn't like?" comment thread is very reasonable and eminently on-topic. When Google cancels their social media product because "they are refocusing priorities" a thread about "hey I heard they had major security issues with the product, so they probably canned it rather than dealing with the fallout of a data breach" is totally fine, even if the official blog post mentions nothing of the sort.
Actually, if you came into the comment thread where a dozen people were already discussing this possibility, and just left a reply to one of the comments of something along the lines of "oh I guess Google thinks social is too hard, they want to focus on Android now"…that's kind of weird, right? This thread was operating under the assumption that Elon was basically lying, and trying to intimidate the ElonJet guy. The person who was going to fund him was clearly doing it because he thought he was giving money to the little guy standing up to the SLAPP abuser. When I said you waltzed in it's that you just came with "I believe every single word from Elon's side of the story and this happens to mean that you are funding a terrible thing". That was not the assumption that this thread was operating under. You can disagree with that assumption but you didn't go "guys why do you even think this is a SLAPP lawsuit?", you went "why are you funding a doxxer who might murder children". How is this an improvement to the discussion?
I don’t agree with your characterization of the situation.
I disagree with all of your factual assumptions, so I then disagree with your moral conclusion.
You can call me monstrous if you want. I frankly don’t care about your opinion of me at all. I’m happy to discuss my moral framework with you if you want, but we’re so far apart on the factual basis that I don’t think it’d be worth the time.
I don’t want to comment on you as a person, but I definitely would call the act deeply immoral.
Tracking the movements of wealthy targets in real time has zero value in terms of political freedoms. It’s primarily of use to kidnappers and other criminals. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a security risk.
> Tracking the movements of wealthy targets in real time has zero value in terms of political freedoms
I mentioned factual disagreement, and those still exist. Without conceding any of those, this is our moral and philosophical disagreement. I don’t think the power of the state should bar all speech that you personally decide has 0 political value.
I think the first amendment rightly tolerates speech, even speech that many people strongly disagree with. I think the government should be extremely hesitant about telling people they can’t speak because their words have “zero political value”.
And I would vigorously oppose a party who is attempting to use the government to punish someone for speaking.
Look, if Elon Musk brings an action that alleges very clear defamation, or if he shows that Sweeney was actively inciting harassment I’d consider otherwise. But if the legal action is only for the actions publicly alleged (posting flight information), that’s simply protected speech by the first amendment. A lawsuit to suppress clearly protected speech is legal thuggery, and I would vigorously oppose that lawsuit.
In much the same way I’ve donated to the ACLU who has stood up for the rights of people I despise to speak.
I definitely don’t agree with your political belief that automated location stalking broadcast on social media should be protected speech, or the belief that the US 1st amendment actually does protect it.
I get where you’re coming from, though. Replace “Elon’s location data” with “Elon is horrible” or “we should tax billionaires at 99%” and I’d also support the right to broadcast it far and wide.
> I definitely don’t agree with your political belief that automated location stalking broadcast on social media should be protected speech
As is absolutely you right! And, were this more private data (like the location of his car being published), I’d be much closer to agreeing with you position.
I think the SCOTUS position on “reasonable expectation of privacy” is not great for taking into account the way our panopticon is able to process so much data that used to be public, but hard to gather at scale.
I’d be pretty willing to be convinced that we should have a serious discussion on the merits and drawbacks of significantly expanding privacy rights, to make some of that illegal.
That being said, the movements of airplanes are inherently public information right now, and already public “at scale”, so I just don’t see a world where I’d agree that aircraft movements should be a part of that framework.
> the belief that the US 1st amendment actually does protect it.
This is a less subjective claim, and is just not accurate. The first amendment absolutely allows someone to publish that information. It’s published publicly by the government! The first amendment absolutely unambiguously protects that information currently.
If making public info more public is legally dicey, then you'd better tell me why you're okay wit Clearview, LexisNexus, et al... And not this guy.
Musk needs to go after the stalker. He deserves a good SLAPP'ing. Fuck billionaires trying to buy their way to immunity to the consequences of their own daft behavior.
I think it's important for people to understand that the money is not the only problem. Even if the defendant never pays a dime, they spend years with a cloud hanging over their lives. There is risk and stress and time lost they they can never get back. I have see people go through it and it is fucking exhausting.
I'm not the one making assertions about legal actions. You can't call someone lazy for not making your arguments for you. I assume you are doing this because you wrote what you did based on information that you cannot back up and are now deflecting.
Since you can't be bothered to post the relevant part yourself, I'll do it for you:
"Courts struck down anti-SLAPP laws in Washington and Minnesota, and Washington enacted an updated law
Courts in Washington and Minnesota struck down their states’ anti-SLAPP laws, finding them unconstitutional under their respective state constitutions. As discussed above, however, Washington enacted an updated anti-SLAPP law in 2021 that addressed the concerns of the state supreme court.
In 2016, a Minnesota appellate court similarly found that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional, finding that the law “deprive[s] the non-moving party of the right to a jury trial by requiring a court to make pretrial factual findings to determine whether the moving party is immune from liability.” Mobile Diagnostic Imaging v. Hooten, 889 N.W.2d 27, 35 (Minn. Ct. App. 2016). The following year, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed, finding that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional as applied to claims alleging torts because it requires a district court to make pretrial factual finding in violation of the plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury under the Minnesota constitution. Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minn., 895 N.W.2d 623, 637–38 (Minn. 2017). These decisions raise concerns that courts in other states that recognize a plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury may follow suit."
From that, I don't know that it's reasonable to conclude that "they likely can't protect Sweeney at all", but IANAL.
It is obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in American law that a statute that has already been struck down twice is unlikely to survive a third challenge. Whoever doesn't understand that has a bunch of Wikipedia pages to read before discussing anti-SLAPP laws.
...and many people would be ready to donate. I wonder if it's possible to crowdfund lawsuits against billionaires, a reverse Thiel (vs Gawker), in a way.
Come on. That is such a bad faith argument to read on HN. There is a difference between open data and someone publicizing it. I know you hate musk but let’s not write reddit-level comment please. If it had been a personality you liked you would have written a totally different comment.
Elon loves to shove himself front and center into the public eye and to stoke a fanbase. Large groups of people inevitably contain some crazy ones. Obsessive para-social relations often lead to unhinged fans stalking or harassing the targets of their obsession. This is so common it has a term coined by Eminem: "Stan".
> How can we prevent this from happening again?
Celebrities are often stalked not just by fans but by reporters. Princess Di was arguably put in a situation by photographers which led to a car crash and her death. It appears the solutions are either:
(1) Don't be famous, or be the type of famous person that has a low profile (there are a lot of them)
(2) If you are a billionaire then you can afford a security detail -- get one
(3) Support real mental health efforts and legislation which funds support for people with mental health issues, instead of sticking them in prison or making them live on the street
So the tl;dr: "If you don't want your kid to be stalked, and the car driving them assaulted, surround them with bodyguards 24/7 or stop being famous". HN really is turning into Reddit these days..
And Elon also goes against common advice and purposely paints a giant target on himself. Not all too irrelevant considering kids are taught at age 2 and held accountable for creating enemies.
Elon's case isn't exactly average even among the ultra-rich.
I expect he will sue those next, forcing them out of business and taking away an extremely useful tool for both general interest and holding people, companies, and countries accountable.
I really don't see how he has a valid case against them as ADS-B data have been public for a long time. An expensive case with very slim chances of winning. Elon is literally scope creep personified. Several of his companies are at crucial stages of management yet this is what he chooses to spend time and energy on (or perhaps that's intentional?),.
Doesn’t need one. Even with SLAPP laws he can make life difficult enough for these sites, none of which are huge with substantial resources, to force many or most to give up and create a serious chilling effect.
From the sounds of it its a bit more than just posting public flight data. He had people at airports tracking the plane as it was changing its flight code to prevent tracking. That goes beyond using public information and enters into stalking teritory, even if only in a fairy minor way.
Not defending the ban, but the context is a bit more complex than posting something off of a public site onto twitter.
Twitter DM, apparently: "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3."
Not really, the party never solicited payment. Musk opened up the negotiations and was then pissed off when the other side didn't accept his first offer.
Well Alex Jones got sued and the judge said he has to pay 1 billion $, and all he was sued for (according to the prosecutor) was publishing the family's information which I'm sure he also found available publicly and they got harassed by other people.
So Elonjet taking the information publicly available, sharing it, and people "harassing" Elon is similar enough.
Again, before Elon bought twitter the narative was that twitter as a private platform could ban anyone they wanted for no reason at all, so if that logic was reasonable then it should be reasonable now.
What I’d make of it is a desperate attempt to conflate two completely different things (one of which to my knowledge isn’t even verified) in hopes of gaining sympathy for pulling the rug on an account without looking like a complete hypocrite. Dude is looking more and more like a pathological liar and sociopath by the minute.
"Sweeney has been using sites such as ADS-B Exchange to track the movements of private jets blogging to celebrities, tech billionaires, and Russian oligarchs for years now. By law, the movement of these plans is publicly available information. “This account has every right to post jet whereabouts, ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even AF1 (@AirForceTrack) Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well,” the account’s pinned tweet read before it was banned."
Thank you. I’m sick of seeing so many people defend this nonsense by portraying it as a safety issue. This issue is public. It’s required to be public. Someone pointing out public info is not a safety issue
This is such a ridiculous take. It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.
Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.
It's doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally. It's not really doxxing if you take info that's broadcast to the public by law and use that. I put out my resume that has my name, address, and phone number on my public website and I wouldn't consider it doxxing if someone uses that info.
If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.
> It’s doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally.
I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.
To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.
Those mental gymnastics happen primarily because anyone looking at the situation for longer than a minute can see people in power use mental gymnastics to keep themselves ahead just as much.
The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.
If they are powerful, there certainly and obviously is.
Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.
Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.
The people who are pretending to care about free speech now by supporting doxxing efforts are way more hypocritical than anyone who supports free speech making an exception for doxxing efforts.
Is he putting that info out there for every psycho to see?
Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.
sounds like you need to go talk to the FAA since they are the ones originally publishing this info rather then a twitter account that is just consuming the info.
Companies that use the data published by the FAA are required to not display information about planes that are part of the LADD program (which Elon's Jet is).
This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.
It’s funny how even despite the fact I didn’t address this situation here to try to speak generally people inevitably found there way back to Musk - but the entire point of doxxing is you take public information and repackage it and focus it in a way to help target an individual. Just because the FAA publishes flight information doesn’t imply they are doxxing someone, if someone built a custom app to track everything a specific famous person was doing including this FAA data, that would be closer to what doxxing actually is.
There seems to be at least somewhat of a reasonable difference between saying "X person is at [x,y,z]" and "A vehicle owned by Y Corp is at [x,y,z]." These seem to me to be in completely different categories.
Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.
I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.
Correct I believe that’s literally where the term came from - it’s aggregating the full set of accessible information about a person into a document for sharing it and helping people locate them in meatspace.
Most doxxing is just taking public info found by a 2 second Google search given the right starting point.
There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.
Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.
> It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.
I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?
Technically, maybe, but it also sounds a lot like a form of doxing. Where people live is not some highly classified secret, but collecting that data about people on a large scale, or posting it online, is not okay. In the same way, posting the whereabouts of someone's personal private plane[0] is not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation, and could be considered stalking.
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
> not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation
As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).
Presence at a specific public event with an audience specifically to see them, is not the same thing as constantly tracking and publishing someone's whereabouts.
Yes and the location of a private plane does not publish someone's whereabouts. It's a freaking plane! That's about as accurate with respect to his whereabouts as Elon Musks home address (likely significantly less accurate).
But nobody is "constantly tracking and publishing his whereabouts".
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
> The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?
Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.
Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.
None of us here are going to have private jet money, so stop dreaming as if these privacy rules on jets is ever going to apply to you, as if we're laying down how privacy should work from first principles. Billionaires live by another set of rules from the rest of us. It's about time any of those rules actually went against them.
People are arguing to normalize the destruction of privacy by saying that data being "public" means that anyone should be allowed to aggregate and publish that data.
I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.
However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.
> Musk has also apparently requested, via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that his plane not be tracked on third-party sites like FlightAware ... “This aircraft is on the the FAA blocklist meaning it is not allowed to be displayed to the general public,” a FlightAware spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “This is something that all 3rd party trackers do usually follow as a list is sent out every month."
Well, ADS-B Exchange still has his plane listed as you can see from the second link. So while that sounds like it could have been the case at one point, it does not seem to be the case right now.
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
ADSBExchange does not participate in the program that the blocklist is part of. They even cover this on their homepage
> First and foremost ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!
LADD is only one system, that adsbexchange doesn't use, but PIA still applies to them. Once the ICAO number changes the link the person posted above will no longer point to Elon's jet. You'd have to again have someone in person at the airport to deanonymize the jet.
ADSB Exchange can't get around ICAO anonymizing just by looking at the transponder data.
> Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code.
You can no longer claim it's public. It was de-anonymized in some way.
It's no longer a case of reposting public information but someone going considerable lengths to post this information.
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
Why are you reposting this multiple times? It's not the end run you think it is: long after that point Musk declared grandly that he would not ban the account because of his stance on free speech.
Elon Musk was already on the record as seeing the safety of children as a limit to free speech.
Jack Sweeney's efforts to deanonymize the plane could be seen as inciting the following of Musk's two year-old child and the ambush of their vehicle.
If the deanonymisation that Jack Sweeney is said to be doing can be argued to be a protected form of free speech, it must also be open to inquiries over whether it is incitement towards violence now that it has resulted in a plausible threat to a life.
Frequently people use combinations of difficult-to-find publicly available information and educated guesswork to locate people and then repackage this information as a "dox" for their followers. Not all of their followers have good intentions and even if they don't literally tell people to intimidate/scare/attack their target, they must eventually be seen as somewhat liable for the actions of their followers once they're aware of them. (Isn't this similar to the argument made about Trump's tweets before he was banned?)
Hopefully, as a private company, Twitter can establish sensible public policy about what speech is allowed or banned and where these lines are.
Also, this application of the rules is completely in line with original policy about inciting harm, and as a private company, Twitter is well within their right to deplatform users that don't follow their rules.
What seems capricious to many right now might actually be even-handed enforcement of pre-existing rules towards people that had gotten used to special treatment. And if it's not even-handed I don't see how anything has changed from before, where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed.
There are written rules about inciting harassment and posting private information/locations without express approval. Ignorance of the rules shouldn't excuse people from following the rules.
It's not whataboutism to point out that these policies existed previously, and that if there are any differences at all it's that the rules weren't always applied for this violation previously. The fact is, certain Twitter accounts used to get a free pass -- I feel like the modern adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" applies.
(Do I believe what I'm saying? Basically, it's one way of looking at things and I think that while this interpretation of the rules and their application is unproven and counter-narrative it is a viable argument that I expect Twitter to make as the new moderation team grows.)
This confuses the issue though. ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement and if an aircraft was going to takeoff that had an unknown ICAO number he'd have someone at the airport to figure out it was Elon's jet that had changed it's ICAO number.
Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.
The ICAO number in the GP's comment is listed in the FAA registry for the N-number: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul... (Mode S Code (Base 16 / Hex): A835AF). Are you saying that PIA program can make registry.faa.gov report data that's either obfuscated or out of sync? Why is it not reporting such data now? (Edit: Or maybe GP's comment is using a non-privacy ICAO number and the actual number squawked is private?)
The PIA program, from my understanding, removes the ICAO number from that page. It's possibly in a state that he's not registered with PIA at the moment.
Are you sure that plane actually has a PIA ICAO number? Or that on the ground spotters were required to find the new ICAO?
I know nothing about this, but was a rabbit hole to explore.
The tail number for his plane is well known. If you put that N-number into an ICAO conversion script (https://www.avionictools.com/icao.php), you get the same Hex number that you see from adsbexchange.com. From what I can tell, the script is using an algorithm and not doing a DB lookup. So, just based on the tail number, you could figure out the canonical ICAO code for the plane.
The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
In order to address this privacy shortcoming, the PIA program exists. This would change the ICAO for the plane to be disconnected from the tail number. But from the tracking website, it seems like the ICAO number for his plane hasn’t been changed/anonymized(?!?). So either, they haven’t actually gotten the new ICAO number installed (after 10-ish months), or the plane isn’t eligible to be part of the program. PIA requires the plane to only fly domestically and have the right kind of transmitter. If the plane flys internationally, it can’t have an anonymized ICAO number.
> Are you sure that plane actually has a PIA ICAO number?
I'm not sure that it does at this very moment, but public statements by Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it. It's possible Elon stopped using it because of that de-anonymizing.
> The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
Yes LADD is a different system and you're not required to follow it as a data provider. FlightRadar24 for example follows it and does not list any LADD aircraft as they use FAA's data feed which requires as it's terms of use that you follow the LADD program.
> Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it
I read that too, but haven’t been able to find any source that wasn’t Sweeny on that. Without another source, I’m more inclined to believe that the plane is part of LADD, but not PIA (or isn’t anymore). And that the plane from the Sweeney tweet from February 2022 may have been another plane entirely. Maybe Musk’s plane was enrolled at one point, but it honestly doesn’t make much sense to me to have a plane enrolled in PIA.
I mean, if I had a private plane, I’d like to keep the option of flying it internationally, which you couldn’t do with an anonymized ICAO (again, according to my limited reading).
Also, given the limited number of PIA planes, it would be trivial to look for ICAO numbers that disappeared at one airport and then for a new private ICAO number to appear at the same airport. The system only makes sense from a privacy perspective if you don’t have continuous monitoring of the ADS-B transponders. As things currently exist, with a small number of PIA planes, it would be obvious to find new codes.
That would certainly be an interesting twist on the story if it wasn't actually covered by PIA and only LADD. I haven't heard this variant before, but it would make a lot of things make sense, but it would give me more questions than answers.
Even if you have PIA though, I don't thing you're restricted from flying internationally. I don't see any comment on the PIA page that says you can't fly internationally with it. Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
> Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
The FAA site made it seem like changing the codes was a non-trivial “process” that wouldn’t want to do regularly. You’d have to reprogram the transponder back to your canonical code, because other countries don’t have access to the private PIA conversion lookup tables. The private ICAO numbers might also conflict with other countries “number space”.
Maybe this is an easy thing, but most changes in aviation don’t seem “quick”.
It might be possible that you’re not allowed to do this on your own as a pilot of a certified plane (and require to pay someone who is certified to do so) but I can change mine very easily from a setup screen in about 30 seconds.
It could be a procedural thing where after switching, the FAA won’t recognise your canonical one? That’s seems a little strange, though.
I don't think that's relevant past the point where Musk is on the record as saying that because he's such a champion of free speech he's not going to ban the account.
So you think he has good reasons for going back on what he claimed was his free speech position. Fair enough. It doesn't mean he hasn't gone back on what he said though, and it definitely fits with previous observations that he doesn't actually care at all about free speech and just does whatever he feels like that day.
Nobody is a true free speech absolutist; and Musk least of all[0]. There are always limits to speech.
Things like libel, threats, blackmail, etc are also speech, and yet banned or restricted in some way. Social media are doing a lot of work exploring the edge cases of these, and it's possible laws need to be updated to account for the results.
[0] Years ago Musk cancelled a Tesla order from a critic. On Twitter, it didn't take him long to ban a lot of satirical accounts.
I agree with you, but I believe it is the case that Elon has previously described himself as a free speech absolutist, so this whole episode is exhibit 487 in the case for Elon having no idea what he's talking about.
It's interesting because Elon agrees with free speech restrictions only when he or his own children are affected, but not others. Case in point, this one + alex jones' controversy ('My firstborn child died in my arms'). Meanwhile, he fired the entire child abuse monitoring section.
And also at this point it's allegedly inciting violence, so his position might even be consistent given changing circumstances. Whether it actually is incitement is still debatable but a person of principle can still change their position without it being a flip flop. If Musk is taking legal action at least there is corresponding litigation for the account suspension for some sort of due process and objectivity.
I fail to see the connection between this video, which was posted well after the account was blocked, given that the account had not tweeted out Musk's location after Dec 12th.
The 'won't somebody think of the children' argument doesn't play nice with 'free speech as long as it is legal'.
If Musk is so concerned about his children's privacy and safety then maybe he should stop tweeting out their whereabouts in real time himself?
The “speech” you speak of is automated broadcasting the movements of wealthy people in real-time. The primary group of people who have use for that information is kidnappers.
There’s zero connection between this “speech” and political freedoms.
Similarly, there’s a huge difference between you sharing you or your family’s location on social media occasionally on your own terms vs strangers tracking and sharing it regularly.
This always was the case and there are zero recorded instances of such so no need to trot out this argument. Musk himself has Tweeted out the location of his child in real time.
No, it's broadcasting the movements of a set of aircraft, using publicly available data. There is no information about who is on board those aircraft.
Nobody has any right to privacy regarding the flight movements of their aircraft, and indeed any idea in that light is antithetical to the entire principal of air traffic control and safe air travel. The idea that people would not be able to track his aircraft if this account is gone is ludicrous, as there are both other flight tracking websites, the ability in some areas to get full flight plans, and even if you're a stalker the ability to just listen into ATC radio near the routes his aircraft use.
You even have spotters who spend all their days at airports logging all aircraft and posting the results online, as they've done for decades, so there's no way for aircraft movements to remain secret for long.
By buying private jets and choosing to use them exclusively, Musk himself gave up his right to any privacy when flying on them. He has other options, such as flying commercially or chartering aircraft, as others in his position have done, but has chosen not to use them. He's now trying to change the rules for everyone else to carve out an exception for himself and other super wealthy individuals.
It's rank hypocrisy and bullying and I'm amazed so many people on HN are supporting him in this, and choosing to believe him rather than reading up on how open this data already is.
And publicly available satellite imagery can track the movements of your car. Depending on the country you live in, the fact that you own the car is also publicly available information.
That doesn’t mean somebody putting those pieces of information together and regularly tweeting your movements isn’t creating a security risk for you. The choice that you make to buy a car or drive it in public also doesn’t mean that you have to welcome automated stalking.
Show me how publicly available satellite imagery could offer anywhere close to the same level of tracking that is federally mandated and available for aircraft, and I might take that argument more seriously.
This account wasn't even 'putting those pieces of information together', he was tweeting it directly from ADSB Exchange, one of a number of collators of ADS-B Out data.
Aircraft movements are not private and haven't been for decades. If you want privacy in your air travel, don't fly everywhere on 1-3 well known private jets.
So these "kidnappers" you are talking about are smart enough to create a security risk for a multi-billionaire who can afford any level of security, but at the same time they are too stupid to combine a few pieces of publicly information themselves and would only be dangerous if some teenager on Twitter does it for them?
Publicly available satellite imagery can’t track my car in any meaningful way. At best you’d be able to figure out the color and (rough) size of it if you knew my address.
> I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids.
That was never going to happen. It's just a way to get people to work their asses off to further his real goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. Ironically, buying Twitter may well end up undoing that.
Free speech applies to all speech, not just political speech. If you want "free speech as long as it's legal", this should be allowed. If you don't that's also fine, but then you can't cite "free speech" as a reason to reinstate Trump (Which Musk did). Although regardless neither of these is a "free speech" issue (In the constitutional sense) since it's about a corporation banning certain things on its platform, which it's perfectly entitled to do. It's just very clearly shown the hypocrisy with which Musk now runs Twitter.
I heard some people walked in to a big building in DC after Trump tweeted which later got him banned. Imagine if it was your building! Or does free speech only apply to things Elon likes?
What does this have to do with tracking his plane using public data? This is not about tracking his, or Grimes' or any other ex's car; not even about stalking them.
If you're the richest person in the world, you're going to have to expect that weirdos are going to follow you around. Many employ private security details. That's just how things are.
That’s not relevant to whether he’s a hypocrite. All that’s relevant is “would he have done the same thing if it was someone else’s location being tweeted out?”
Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”
He'd say "one two gerbil gerbil fourteen spiders singin' to me" if it would affect the stock price of anything he's planning on buying or selling, or harming something that cuts into his earnings.
Previous strategy to appeal to tech was to pick last week's top post on /r/iamverysmart and state it as his philosophy.
Current strategy now that tech has soured on him the past few years, is transitioning to parroting fascist dogwhistles.
In two years he buys Whole Foods and will be ranting about holistic lifestyle chakra healing.
Not even sure I fully trust Musk on this, after he lied about holding his child that died; when it turned out the mother did and it was SIDS related, he's got form on using his children to manipulate the outside world.
Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.
> Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.
In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.
Since I onow people whos children actually did die in their very arms, using such a dramatic experience and be untruthful about it is simply dispicable. Especially since having your child die in front of you doesn't need any further dramatization at all.
Did you actually read the files? They don't have any naked Hunter Biden pics (thank God).
It's mostly about Twitter fabrication of Hunter Biden was hacked (discovered during laptop dissembly) and the connections between federal government and Twitter's staff.
I meant Elon commissioned posts that Matt Taibi posted. Links to Hunter’s pics were among them. If you are curious it was Tweet 8. Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
> Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.
Yeah, obviously those pictures and associated tweets are deleted. That is why we are here. However, those are archived in WaybackMachine(archive.org). Copy/paste those links there.
>A masked stalker, dressed all in black, was following his young child in car thinking it was him.
I mean, maybe?
I don't see a masked stalker doing much of anything in that video. In fact, the masked stalked in the car seems afraid of the person doing the filming (a security guard?). Certainly not showing much aggression. The claim is that this person then got out of the car and jumped on the hood of Elon's car preventing it from moving, but that wasn't caught on video?
Of course an event like this would cause me to rethink my position. But I don't think I would wait until it actually happened to my child.
People have been raising these kinds of concerns to free speech absolutists like Musk for a while, but until it impacts him they are theoretical concerns that aren't as important as his principles.
If he uses this personal experience as an opportunity to empathize with others and reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then that is commendable.
Or, if he maintained his commitment to free speech in the face of personal danger to his family I would respect such a principled stance.
However, if he only bans those who might cause him (or people he likes) harm while allowing and even encouraging those who use free speech to incite harm against others then that seems hypocritical.
citizens deserve equal protection under the law. there's nothing special about his kid (or him). if anything, information about public figures, when in public, deserves less shielding.
No, I think it’s relevant because the banned account was not just “sharing public information”, but actively tracking Musk using a combination of online data and real word surveillance.
The fact that Musk previously said he wouldn’t ban the account, then changed his mind (apparently after a personal incident) just shows Musk changed his mind, is all.
It certainly demonstrates he didn’t think through his previous decision, suggesting it was a spontaneous comment and not a rigorous policy. Which is worrying, because publishers such as Twitter need to have a consistent and coherent moderation policy.
But it’s still relevant if we’re to decide which position we agree with, and whether Musk was “right” previously or now.
That Musk 'changed his mind' on the one thing that he said would set Twitter apart from 'the rest' is where I have a problem: this is a matter of principle so dear that it should override his personal affairs because that is what he is on the record about. If Musk's principles only hold water as long as he isn't personally affected then I'm fine with that but then he should get off his high horse and stop pretending.
Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
> Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
So Twitter is now unusable because elonjet has been banned? Social media companies change their policies all the time. You don't have to agree with the decision but holding it up as something so consequential is just silly.
Assuming what he said about his son being accosted is true, how could he not change his mind? Should he really not stop something that threatened his kids life because of a promise he made to internet strangers?
If Elon uses this personal experience as an opportunity to reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then I will commend him for finally maturing past the "free speech absolutist" position.
If he simply bans those who would cause him (or people he likes) harm but continue to allow and encourage "free speech" for those who would cause harm to others then that seems a bit hypocritical.
This is an extreme exaggeration. If you've used Twitter since the Musk takeover and come away with the impression that you can't criticize him there, you've had a completely alien experience to mine- it seems to be the main use of the site these days.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
As he originally announced his non-banning as being due to his fundamental principles, it's more than just changing his mind. He should at least clarify how his attitude towards freedom of speech on Twitter has developed. Personally I think he's being disingenuous as he doesn't seem to care about other people's safety following even his own tweets, so although I can understand him putting his own family first, he should now appreciate that his previous stance on absolute free speech is untenable.
He perhaps wouldn't have. Then again, so? Incidents happening to us and our family, hit us harder, and can move us to take specific action more often, news at 11.
So free speech only counts when it doesn't affect you personally, got it.
I don't think anyone would really care about this had he not made purchasing Twitter all about trying to save us from the evil Twitter censorship demons.
>So free speech only counts when it doesn't affect you personally, got it
Yes, people are less accepting of things that personally are meant to spite/hurt them, even if they match their general principles. News at 11.
Besides, free speech is about sharing opinions and such, however controversial. Petty "I'll share your itinerary to the world" is not real speech, opinion, let alone an argument. It is doxxing/stalking - that the information is publicly available in aviation registers is irrelevant (lots of stalking information is: the doxxing/stalking/threatening part is extracting it from its normal location, highlighting, it and making it more public).
There's a number of valid arguments for why the plane tracker may not be doxxing, and a couple tenuous, but valid arguments for why to ban the plane tracker account.
But no matter how you slice it, this account (and it's owner's personal account) were targeted purely because they irked Musk, and he has given zero indication that he plans to enforce this rule for basically any other account.
I suspect we're quickly approaching the point where impotent cries of hypocrisy will no longer be considered even worth issuing. Maybe we're already there. The charge is inert, it does not sting, it changes no minds, and is slightly entertaining to haters, who chuckle for less than a second, and then get on with their lives.
So? Everyone keeps saying this over and over, but leaving out the most important part. In the same tweet he admitted it’s a direct threat to his personal safety! Can you comment on that part? Because it seems like people want, with Elon and other celebrities, to be put in harms way, in the name of keeping these doxxing accounts online. Which by the way are made by some college kid who probably doesn’t realize the ramifications of what he’s doing.
Right now it seems like he's willing to defend he and his friend's personal safety (his friend's safety as an after thought mind you), but he doesn't much care about the safety of people he's upset with.
Meh. Musk has no problem handing information to journalists like Matt Taibbi that included personal email addresses, all the better for Taibbi to accidentally publish.
Musk had no problem insinuating that Yoel Roth was a pedophile (as is Musk's style), reportedly forcing Roth into hiding.
Does Musk recognize the ramifications of what he was doing in either case? No. At any rate, it's pretty clear that the "threats to personal safety" is a mask, he clearly is fine with doxxing and threatening other people's public safety... as long as he is the aggressor, not the victim.
> ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement
Maybe he should just buy another jet or two, make sure the other jet(s) are in regular use (maybe shuttling SpaceX/Tesla/Twitter/etc employees around), and make sure he regularly swaps which one he is personally using. Extremely expensive solution, but not beyond his budget.
Or maybe he should just buy himself a private jet chartering firm. An even more expensive solution, but he can probably afford that too.
> "ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program"
Only through a manual process that sounds like it can take a month or so to complete.
Perhaps, in future, this could be solved with technology that automates generation/randomisation of Aircraft IDs, much like MAC addresses on phones and laptops are randomised to prevent tracking?
Next-generation ADS-B transponders could communicate with the FAA (or appropriate local authority) via satellite or mobile network to generate/request a new, random ID before every flight.
Every measure like that introduces safety risk into the critical air traffic control system by increasing the odds of data inconsistencies and other things going wrong. I don't believe it's worth it just to preserve the privacy of billionaires and corporations.
Of course not, but what is the risk here to actual traffic? the plane still transmit its location so others can see it, they simply can't know the exact instance. Seriously asking out of curiosity.
The aircraft's type is not part of ADS-B Out data, it has to be looked up in a database using the hex code. This has implications for aircraft separation, as heavier aircraft produce more turbulence that can be harmful to smaller aircraft. A bad or missing weight category caused by something like PIA having a code collision or a failed update could lead to a fatal accident if the separation for a small aircraft is used for a large one.
A small risk, and something that could be mitigated, but still there nonetheless.
The proposals to encrypt ADS-B data, being driven by corporations and wealthy individuals, are more risky in that they add key management to the mix and make it much more likely that something will go wrong and cause widespread ATC failures or aircraft going dark on ATC displays and in collision avoidance systems at critical moments. Especially as there'll be a mix of encrypted/non-encrypted transponders for decades to come.
Presumably, just aircraft IDs would be encrypted, and not data that is safety-critical for collision avoidance? Things like callsigns (which can be changed each flight and don't necessarily have to be the aircraft's registration) and weight category could also be added, unencrypted, so that ATC screens wouldn't go dark if there was some sort of key management failure.
There is also an argument for some sort of cryptographic signing of ADS-B messages in order to prevent spoofing.
Aircraft IDs are used for type lookups and uniqueness. Callsigns are already in the signal and must be the registration for anything other than commercial or military flights, as they're registered and there's a process for allocation. Weight category and other data being added would require a whole new revision of the standard and will not reach most systems for decades.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
The GDPR only applies to businesses, not individuals. So, clearly in this case it does not apply at all since the person behind @ElonJet is acting in an individual capacity.
The GDPR applies to everyone, except "by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity", member states and some authorities.
So to be clear, this info is already public but a lack of web scraping ability prevents the low end stalkers from stalking without the twitter account.
yeah, this seems fake as hell. the coincidental timing, the clumsy on-the-nose nature of this incident, the "perp" calmly letting the guy take video of his (paper?) license plate...in what appears to be a parking lot? come on.
Musk has now included a tweet seemingly trying to dox the stalker, including their license plate. How can he immediately turn from "people shouldn't post publicly available information that can be abusable" to posting someone's abusable public information?
> How can he immediately turn from "people shouldn't post publicly available information that can be abusable" to posting someone's abusable public information?
It's possible to do great things and still be a terrible person. I know some people might find it hard to believe but it's also possible for people to change as they age/get richer/get more powerful/get less powerful/get poorer etc. Elon 10 years ago isn't Elon today.
Could you elaborate how that site proves anything? I can create a github page and type "Elon Musk hates all children". Does that also mean it's a proof?
The original source of that info was [1] - a reasonably reputable journal, I believe, and I would suggest an order of magnitude more reliable than "a github page". Not least because you can be sure that their legal team went through it with a fine toothcomb before it was published.
So you'd be calm enough to institute new anti-doxxing rules in your social media company before deciding to dox the person you think is bothering you? I could understand acting rashly while the emotions are high, but I find it difficult to see this chain of events that way.
I'm worried about the side effects if Elon gets his way.
Could this cause people to face legal problems if they share tracking info on federal or military flights such as those who spy on people?
Could it stretch out to satellites, just how expansive would the ruling be if Elon won, and how hard and expensive would it be to narrow it back if possible?
> On Wednesday evening, the account was briefly restored, with Twitter outlining new rules seemingly designed to prevent Sweeney from posting the real-time locations of planes used by Musk and other public figures as long as he included a slight delay. Sweeney, over Twitter, asked Musk how long he’d have to delay the data to comply.
> But Wednesday evening, Musk threatened to escalate the conflict against Sweeney, saying a car carrying Musk’s son, X Æ A-12, had been “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles, implying without providing evidence that location data had been a factor in the purported episode. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” Musk tweeted.
> Sweeney, 20, shared publicly available information about Musk’s flights, not his family members or his cars. The records stopped and ended at airports, and Musk has provided no further detail as to what legal basis Musk would cite in a lawsuit.
I heard that he gave his child a strange name, but... that is just something else.
On topic: I don't see how a flight location could be shown to cause that event. If I told you that I was arriving somewhere at LAX at around 0900 could you find me?
Don't Teslas have several cameras that may record such incidents. If that's the case, can't someone accessing the vehicle's controls share with Elon and the world that this was the case?
1. This has nothing to do with the location of his private jet.
2. You can't do whatever you want, even to protect your family. Elon has a lot of power, he can't be allowed to abuse it because some guy decided to stalk him.
Technically yes, however, by his own admission this is a genuine safety concern. Based on his own admission,the EU would expect a consistent ban on all accounts that share such information, not just the account that targets Elon Musk.
I am sure this will fly below the radar, however, once again shows there is no consistent moderation policy across Twitter. So far it seems Musk will only respond if it affects his own family.
This incident is entirely between the perpetrator and Elon. Jack Sweeney's bot has nothing to do with it because a bot relaying public info that could've been retrieved using a plethora of alternative means bears no responsibility for potentially causing this incident.
You noticed that slight of hand too? Go back to the original HN thread on this ban and you’ll find a poster asking for another “narrative” besides Musk being a rank hypocrite. This is that narrative his followers were looking for.
The slight of hand here is to conflate the car and the plane and the dates. This allows his followers to push a “it was for his child’s safety!” argument, in which yet again Elon Musk uses his children as a prop to avoid critical examination of his new story. Which, as you and others point out, falls apart due to the timing of the last tweet and the purported incident.
How is that relevant except that it demonstrates even further hypocrisy from Musk? Which is not surprising.
Also Musk isn't really trustworthy so unless this is confirmed by am independent third party there is no reason to believe the guy that moves tens of thousands of dollars to harass rescue personnel.
Even if Musk is not lying there still isn't a connection.
Edit: apparently the last data published from the elonjet account is from December 12th. Making this even more ridiculous. Not sure what I expected.
* was accused by an ex wife of lying about it. The same ex wife that notoriously does anything for media attention, writes online incessantly about her divorce with Elon, who's made multiple easily disproven lies, has publicly smeared him for financial gain during divorce proceedings, and had her own divorce judge not agree with the validity of any of her claims.
Now apply the same logic to libs of tiktok. she set off qanon extremists to threaten Boston Children’s hospital. but Elon encourages re-instated her account and regularly engages with her
Musk considers harm to anyone's family other than his to be necessary for Twitter revenue.
> organizations who supported harm to my family
A significant problem in Twitter and social media in general. Musk seeks to protect himself, while opening the floodgates on others for his version of "free speech" by unbanning accounts previously flagged as abusive.
Hey remember the last time Musk used a claim about one of his kids to justify an action that against was what he previously said would be his policy? What was that, a week ago?
Elon have an army of followers with size of multiple 4chan's and some of them are obviously less stable than others. He is aware of this fact and over years he did not act responsible about it.
Also he is protected by an army of lawyers so he can smoke some weed and tweet that he thinks that you @memish is a pedophile or Hunter Biden friend or MAGA supporter or whatever. And you'll get tons of death treats as result.
If your response is that it doesn't qualify, neither does reporting information about his private jet.
The leson here is more general - having a platform should be seen as a big responsibility where great care must be taken to prevent one's actions from having unintended consequences.
Come on, if you didn't notice the unfounded insinuation that a former high-ranking corporate officer at Twitter was really a pedophile and the resultant fallout over the last 72 hours, then you are really not paying attention.
Is he afraid of a stalker following him in a plane? He uses this as an excuse, then discredits himself by going on to threaten legal action against Sweeney. Wants it both ways.
Knowing when/where a private plane lands makes it a lot easier to stalk the passengers of that plane.
This is of course entirely separate from whether such info was used against Musk or his family, or whether such a possibility is sufficient grounds for attempting to silence those who make it easily accessible (it's still accessible thanks to ADS-B for anyone with basic technical skills and cares enough).
Conclusion: if you are concerned about stalkers do not use private planes. Because that information is out there anyway and closing the one account on Twitter is definitely not going to stop any determined stalker.
Bernard Arnault (the new richest person in the world, and head of LVMH group) gave up his personal private jet to avoid this kind of tracking. Elon Musk can too if he wants to avoid the scrutiny.
Yes, he's not about to fly commercial first class like one of the poors. He just has a better sense of opsec than Elon Musk, and a desire to stay out of the spotlight.
Step 2. Copy one of the tail numbers from the first result: “N628TS, N272BG, N502SX”
Step 3. Paste one of the tail numbers into any one of the flight tracker apps.
If your stalkers can’t even figure that out, you don’t have to worry about them. Otherwise… it’ll take them an extra 45 seconds compared to finding the ElonJet twitter account.
The first blocks it from showing up on sites like flightradar24 which filters out LADD aircraft.
The second makes it so you can't go from tail number to tracking the aircraft once the ICAO has changed and ADSB Exchange doesn't manually update their database of which pseudonymous ICAO numbers are connected to which tail numbers.
ADS-B allows planes to track each other during flight so they don’t crash into each other. It is public because that’s the point: to broadcast their location publicly.
All those FAA rules do is mask it in their own public data set that they make available. Anyone with their own data set (aka an SDR at SMO if they’re trying to stalk Musk) like ADSBExchange is not required to mask that data and any law trying force them would run afoul of the first amendment and compromise aviation, since ADS-B makes flight safer for hundreds of thousands of pilots.
However on your second point you seem to be confusing two different things. There's two different systems that you're lumping together as one. The one you're talking about is LADD. Discussed here: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
FAA even caveats themselves:
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
Now to your point, you're incorrect. PIA, as mentioned in that quote by the FAA, literally changes the aircraft's ICAO number to a new number and delists it from public registries. Using an SDR or the data from ADSB Exchange only gets you that psuedonomynous ID. Once that's changed again you have to stalk someone by following them to the airport and align the takeoff time of when you know they left with the new ICAO number. That's the ethically/morally/legally quesitonable aspect about all of this.
> In order to mitigate these concerns, FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO aircraft address program with the objective of improving the privacy of aircraft operators in today's ADS-B environment by limiting the extent to which the aircraft can be quickly and easily identified by non-U.S. government entities, while ensuring there is no adverse effect on ATC services.
Thank you for the link, I wasn’t aware that PIA allowed spoofing the identifier.
Maaaybe it’s more ethically/morally questionable [1] but I don’t think it’s a legal issue. Reading more on the PIA, it still require the owner to have their own operational security. Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
[1] or in this case Musk’s actions on Twitter are less ethically/morally/legally questionable?
I mention legal as in some jurisdictions stalking is illegal which this may fall under. I am not a lawyer though, so I only give it as an open question that I myself have.
> Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
That's true, but that falls into the stalking or doxxing category and Twitter already had long standing terms of service statements against doxxing, even before Elon bought Twitter, even if it's not illegal (which I still have open questions about).
I definitely see your point, I’d be consulting a bunch of lawyers if I were Sweeney just to be sure. California’s (cyber)stalking/harassment laws are pretty specific on what constitutes doxxing and stalking, though. For the sake of this conversation between laymen, I just don’t see it.
Musk can do whatever he wants on twitter and IANAL so what do I know, but between the public interest argument and the public availability of the information, I don’t think Musk has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That said, anyone using the information to follow him around or harass him is liable to get prosecuted.
Yes, note that I did not justify banning the twitter account in question and pointed out that it was hardly a leap to get the info even if they banned that account.
I was simply replying to a comment that inferred the only way flight info was useful for a stalker was if you planned on stalking them in another plane... which is obviously incorrect.
1,425 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 633 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/PutinJet
https://twitter.com/RUOligarchJets
https://twitter.com/USAirForceVIP
https://twitter.com/AirForceTrack
https://twitter.com/bezosjets
Do you know any other banned accounts?
Let's make a list to make sure they all restored.
UPD: More accounts...
https://twitter.com/zuccjet
And his own account: https://twitter.com/JxckSweeney
Applying bans retroactively seems very unfair. (Unless this is an automated mistake.)
https://twitter.com/CelebJets
* https://twitter.com/dataracer117/status/1519167734910619649?...
No one asked either of them to be public figures. They can go away whenever they want. Their status is not an immutable law of reality and humanity tends to have a history of not giving a toss about being helicoptered by self aggrandizing individuals.
The data is available real time by law elsewhere. He’s not routing around anything, just trying to insulate himself from consequences of his actions, and cement his genius by flailing around like the party drug using, half wit he actually is.
No he has not. In fact I bet you can't show us where he's called for anyone's death.
Compare this situation to when McCain responded to that woman during his presidential campaign who said something along the lines of "Obama is a scary Muslim" and McCain showed himself as a man of true honor, saying "No, he's a good man, loves his family." and maybe said something like [I disagree with him politically but he's not a dangerous threat].
It's just an obvious corollary.
Fauci received death threats, therefore all related tweets should be removed.
Crafting consistent moderation policies is a hard problem (kudos to dang and team)
[1] https://grndcntrl.net/links/
Streisand strikes again
Instead he given some empty promises about "being free speech absolutist" and "not banning account that track his private jet" just to do exactly that shortly after. It's hypocrisy and he should pay dearly for that with what reputation he still have.
It's trying to be both ban-everything-elon-dislikes while letting Elon claim Twitter is a full free speech zone that makes it entertaining. Trying to make rules around how Elon is feeling that day, and probably how high he is at the time of the pronouncement is always going to make for ridiculous results
The information is out there already, but this practice goes a step further by shining a spotlight on a person (and their children's) locations.
People would have a different attitude if this guy's niche was live tweeting female celebrity's locations instead of billionaires.
Pointing out which city (or even airport) someone is in hardly seems like much of a danger.
Doesn't mean that users (like me) are going to be happy or continue using Twitter.
This makes “I am at <concert> watching <performer>” a violation.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
"Use of the national airspace is generally considered public information because pilots – whether airline captains or recreational fliers – rely on a system of air traffic controllers, radars, runways and taxiways, lighting systems and towers that are all paid for or subsidized by taxpayers.
As a result, flight data collected by the FAA in its air traffic control system – except for military and sensitive government flights – is public information. Web sites such as FlightAware post the data online, allowing anyone to observe the system and follow most planes virtually in real time."
Which is not to say that Elon setting foot onto the tarmac should be open to the general public - but the very fact that airports are restricted spaces makes this kind of information more comfortable.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/off-the-radar-private-pla...
I’m not arguing about anything here except for Twitter’s new policy. I don’t think it’s a good policy and it makes the lie of Musk’s “commitment” to free speech but it says what it says.
> "You can still share your own live location on Twitter."
The new Twitter is just Elon being offended and abusing his power, then retweeting and liking single tweets that validate his current mood
"Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy."
PS: I'm not exactly into US celebrities, but I'm very much into stalking Putin and his cronies using OSINT reporting on Twitter. Now anyone who publicly share their movements can be banned.
https://twitter.com/ByPatForde/status/1600993384851652608
Maybe not a technical violation since it said "earlier today" -- but a random student tweeting the same right after seeing him on campus would get the account suspended?
A fan saying "OMG, just saw Kanye at the Whole Foods in El Segundo" would be worthy of suspension?
News stories about various public officials secret trips for negotiations would be worthy of suspension?
Doesn't seem very "free speechey" to me.
Seems like the rules would allow journalists to share a story reporting if Elon Musk visited any Saudi creditors, but if they include the location of the meeting in their reporting then they wouldn’t be allowed to post it on Twitter until after the meeting.
"an arrangement to do something or go somewhere at a fixed time."
The point is to be able to affect outcomes.
Information about Russian government aircrafts or Putin's oligarchs private jets leaving country can be important in real time. Musk banned those too.
It's possible without Twitter, but bans for sharing of location information will make it much easier for Russia to block investigator accounts.
Reddit locating the boston bomber, etc.
> In addition, you may not share private media, such as images or videos of private individuals, without their consent. However, we recognise that there are instances where users may share images or videos of private individuals, who are not public figures, as part of a newsworthy event or to further public discourse on issues or events of public interest. In such cases, we may allow the media to remain on the platform.
So vague it's impossible to determine in advance what's allowed and what's not.
"You have 24 hours. You have to write some rules that make my private jet's flights that are public information available on a public website in real time disallowed, while also making Hunter Biden's hacked nudes allowed. Go."
again, make it reasonable to protect me and my family but unreasonable to protect 'those' people."
Is there anywhere in the policy that specifies that? By my read of the policy this is disallowed no matter what the other person thinks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986234
The main one with over 1k comments and points survived only 6 hours.
In principle we would turn off the user flags and software penalties, but the thread quality is so wretched that I see no upside. I'm shocked, and I don't shock easily after 10 years of this.
Arguably the default fate of internet forums is to eventually burn out and become scorched earth, but the idea of HN from the beginning has been to stave that off for as long as we can.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Almost makes me wish you penalized every single account that commented here. It would not be just, but it might stave off the flame out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Edit: he's still completely asking this up as he goes along
They might have a product in subscriptions, depending on how many people sign up.
But the debt is going to tank the company in 16 months unless the subscription business really defies gravity.
As the once-upon-a-time moderator of a very large website this list reads all too familiar. Thanks for posting it!
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok."
> We define “live” as real-time and/or same-day information where there is potential that the individual could still be at the named location.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
It is 24 hours now... what about in the future breaking news at Musk conference will require 10 years space.
Also the whole idea of doxing him... is he special or not? Otherwise we should not track anyone's flying info... but then government keeps this data open. Funny, the government turned out to give you more freedom of speech than a private company!
The problem is, that Elon very publicly and explicitly promised that @ElonJet would be allowed to continue as it is. His words mean less and less…
I've been seeing a lot more people posting about boycotting Tesla and associating ownership with his views. I drive a Tesla and frequently people bring up Elon to me. I usually just tell people I don't like/care about Elon but I like the cars Tesla makes.
I'm sure you have a point though: to step out of his bubble of yes-men must have been a cold shower.
One can only hope.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944
Seems a bit of a stretch to blame the creator of elonjet for a stalker being able to find his car. The flight information is public information. Even if it wasn't and/or he flew commercial, people would probably be posting about where they saw him due to him being a public figure.
Sigh.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/12/musk-tw...
its just more clear to more remote/casual observers the last two months
I genuinely think he just found it irritating that someone was trying to make him look bad. I don’t blame him, I’d probably feel the same way. But then I haven’t bought a social media platform and loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that I am a free-speech absolutist.
Unless Elon plans to ban the FAA from doing its job, people will know where Elon Musk's airplane is at all times.
Banning a silly Twitter account that copy/pastes data from the FAA won't change a thing.
The paparazzi have been using these things to follow celebrities since forever. It's an exorcise in ignorance to ignore the nature of FAA regulations / airplane tracking.
AFAIK all you need to gather ADS-B information for your own location is Android Phone, $30 USB dongle and some Antena.
It may be more of an exercise of Elon flexing his $44B investment over the heaters and the poor people: by this point he knows that anyone even slightly left of center is not going to love him, so he's full on embracing the far/alt right crowd by "owning the libs". "Free speech" is lip service at max that some people fell for hook, line, and sinker.
Ms. Barbra Streisand, on the white courtesy phone...
He has all rights to ban whoever he wishes since he owns the platform, but common sense should suggest him to stop talking about free speech since he's in no position to lecture anyone on the matter.
I'm sure stuff like antidiscrimination law etc. in several jurisdictions would make such behavior illegal.
Of course it does.
When you make something easier to do, the effect is it increases the chance of people doing it.
If your contact information is listed in a telephone book, it is publicly accessible information. Anyone can look that up. But who's going to do that? (to prank call you for example). But if some posts your info to a twitter account that reaches millions, chances are someone's going to call you. Why? Because popped up in millions of peoples' twitter feeds. And since it's so low effort, one or more people with nothing better to do will call.
so why does he actively mock some people or groups and make them seem unreasonable when they ask for twitter to help with their safety?
do only billionaires get help from twitter now?
People get threatened by random weirdos all the time.
Even if congress shutdown ADS-B receiving or encrypting it somehow, people would just get out the long range camera lenses and take pictures of the tail numbers as the planes land and report it on a web site.
Congress could presumably pass some law but it would have to be ICAO or some other global organization that would formalize the change. Updating the systems on all aircraft would take many years. The current roll-out has been in progress for more than a decade.
Step 2: Repeat Step 1 for a long time
Step 3: Enough people believe it it's true.
When the twitter obituary is written, people will say this was the death knell.
As for me liking Elon Musk: I used to. And then somewhere along the line it changed and now I in fact do not like him. But my liking or not liking him has nothing to do with simply holding him accountable, he made some pretty expensive statements and he fails to live by them, even for a very short period. And conveniently just when he's decided to ban that account a stalker of his family pops out of the woodwork. I'm sorry but Musk has lost the benefit of the doubt with me, too many lies over too many years.
This is after very publicly saying he would stand up even to people posting his flight info just last month.
I get being emotional about the kid being stalked but the mixed signals are just frustrating.
Edit: an upthread comment states that the owner of the elonjet account says that the account has not tweeted since Dec. 12th so that the two can't possibly be connected.
Even your comment emphasizes the concept of "public information"
Now, if I'm pseudonymous, that's a different matter: someone would be revealing my real name's association with that pseudonym, which may be a problem.
To each his own.
Explain Libs of Tiktok.
He supported it in theory until he learned that it could affect not just him but his family.
He's done good things with SpaceX and Tesla. He's flawed. Shrug.
Elon has an extensive history of vindictiveness.
He was derisive of Musk, who wanted Tesla engineers to help rescue the trapped children.
Musk responded to this criticism by calling Unsworth a "pedo" and "child rapist" and hiring a private detective to investigate Unsworth. Unsworth ended up suing Musk for defamation.
Flawed is liking pineapple on pizza, not using your platform of millions of followers to call someone a child rapist. That's worthy of contempt to me.
I'm cynical though, I only see lesser evils as all you can wish for in politics and culture. Trusting in politicized public figures = pure disappointment
The most sympathetic scenario re: twitter (ignoring the other Musk issues around FSD/pre-Twitter stuff): a few very public examples of him censoring people for petty reasons VS pre-Musk twitter banning (or silently shadowbanning) many thousands who happened to fall outside the current-thing Overton Window, using equally or worse biased/misguided reasons (ie, 'misinformation') and quietly taking requests from gov/intel agencies... still a net gain over all. But tons of work to be done.
And I think Elon does some really dumb things but in general I want him to succeed on what he is doing.
Either:
1) This is a change to policy, or
2) Twitter didn't enforce the rules evenly to punish people they didn't like, like Elon
It fits pretty well with Musk's "woke" obsession. He should be able to do and say whatever he wants. But if he gets booed in response, then "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters". Because the booers couldn't possibly be equal humans using freedom of speech to express their feelings.
At this point if you believe anything Musk claims you are the dullest, most gullible shit I can imagine.
This is amazing.
Might as well ban people posting photos of celebrities at random places, it's way more accurate.
Obviously it’s still way better situation than quiet censorship for everyone outside the Overton window and via gov request Vs a small very public group of cases for a billionaire’s petty exceptions to the rule, but it’s not helping the cause in the culture war pushing for censorship.
And so far I think the direction he's taking Twitter looks very promising in injecting some diversity into the social media landscape and shaking the government-corporate attacks on speech. Maybe not very much and may be futile in the long run with a meek subservient populace who beg to be ruled, but certainly better than before.
The lesson for others to not be hysterical and look at the bigger picture of the net gain of reducing censorship (and the fact Twitter was already an ideological disaster that can either only get better from here.... or die - win/win) is probably going to hit a brick wall.
They have their own ideological battles to pick. And Elon handed it to them wrapped in a bow. So they might as well take the victory lap.
It's not quite the anything-that-is-not-illegal that Musk was blathering about (although it's possible it could run afoul of stalking laws in some countries/jurisdictions), but it's really nothing compared with the politically motivated and government involved censorship and banning that had been going on there.
He just needs 3, or 4 or 5, more jets. Each flies off in a different direction.
I don't see the point of blocking it on Twitter when it's readily available on any flight tracking platform.
Bug or banned? In modern twitter, who knows?!
Meanwhile, half the bots I've blocked still show up in my news feed (when it loads and I check, both of which have diminished greatly in the past few weeks)
Unfortunately I can no longer edit the title.
Edit: figured it out - content filter on the wifi I was using was filtering out some but not all Twitter URLs. It’s always DNS, I should know better.
[1] https://twitter.com/kingslyj/status/1601933093006610433
Is there an elonsjetsjet Twitter account to track elonsjets movements?
Of course spouting a load of nonsense about former Twitter employees to the point that they have to evacuate their home is perfectly ok by that same token.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/12/musk-tw...
Forgive me if I don’t give the Washington Post’s vague reporting and anonymous sources much credence. There are zero details here, and no claim of independent verification other than repeating the hearsay of an anonymous “person familiar” — not even a direct source.
How has this story been verified? If it was verified, how were they “forced”? Under what circumstances, specifically?
This isn’t reporting, it’s outrage farming.
You can dismiss mainstream press if you like, but the point is it’s not a HN commenter being hysterical or equivalent to subreddit speculation: this is reported news.
"Evacuating" one's home != "having" to evacuate one's home
"Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.
Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family."
Make that what you will.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944
[0]. Assuming the allegations about it happening are true.
ElonJet didn’t tweet anything on the day this incident occurred, so that part is false too.
In Los Angeles there are hundreds of private flights per day, and wealthy people pay for hangar space. It may well be possible to stalk someone this way, but I don't think it's such a foregone conclusion.
It's also conceivable that a very wealthy person with a flair for hype and dramatic gestures would stage an event as a demonstration or object lesson; we know of celebrities who have done just that is a misguided attempt to solicit public sympathy.
I am not suggesting this has happened; it's just one of numerous possibilities, and I point it out to point out that it's no more irrational than other plausible allegations.
Zero sympathy here. I'm actually more upset that there appears to be a "hush hush, pay to anonymize" program, and that it isn't rolled out as a default. Billionaires do not deserve exclusions from the baseline risk profiles everyone else endures.
He had a hard-on for the @elonjets account well before this alleged incident.
Law enforcement says NO! In the distance
Guess that's that.
Welcome to being a trackable number Elon. Remember, it's all in the public interest. Also, It's funny how billionaire's pander to this type of surveillance in the Board Room, but suddenly start trying to throw off the bit/yoke when it starts to inconvenience them personally once somebody is sufficiently motivated to start leveraging the data trail they all are instrumental in maintaining.
Gotta love the self-referential inconsistency.
Good that cars dont do it unlike private jets!
That would be terrible for privacy... /s
Early Onstar vehicles are trivial to disable and later ones can still be disabled by removing the radio transceiver. The vehicle operates normally without it, unlike a Tesla.
The only things that won't work with no cell connection while you are in the car are things like spotify app in the car (but you can still use spotify through the car bluetooth connected to your phone, if you preloaded the songs on your phone) or being able to see live stats of the car in your phone app.
When you press the record button, it dumps the past 10 mins of video from 4 external cameras onto the drive. When the car is fully stopped, you can either watch the video on the screen inside the car or unplug the drive and watch it on your laptop or on any other device that can read from usb/external drives.
There is also an automatic (aka sentry) mode that triggers dumping a video by any nearby action, but that's only when the car is parked and left unattended.
The sad part is I’m sure Elon can bury this guy in fees even if the lawsuit is ultimately ruled as entirely without merit.
Given my real name — which is available on Twitter — my home address is not difficult to obtain from online, public, governmental real estate records.
Despite the fact that the information is public, it would still be doxxing — not to mention inappropriate, violating, and frightening — if someone decided to dig up that address and post it to a broad audience on Twitter that would have otherwise been unaware of it. This is even more true if that audience is hostile, and my information is being posted in an attempt to harass and/or intimidate.
If you want to expand the definition of the word doxxing then that's fine but you'll have to have that conversation all by yourself.
I'll just use this one:
"Doxing" is a neologism. It originates from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation "docs" (for "documents") and refers to "compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone".Essentially, doxing is revealing and publicizing the records of an individual, which were previously private or difficult to obtain. "
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
So this isn't doxing, since the information isn't private and it isn't difficult to obtain.
> Doxing or doxxing (originally spelled in 1337 as d0xing) is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregration of this information from public source or record databases and social media websites (like Facebook), as well as the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means such as hacking and social engineering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
So this is doxxing, and you dishonestly cherry-picked an incomplete definition. In case any confusion remains, here’s the Oxford Languages’ definition:
> search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
Posting your home address which you've kept out of the public eye is doxing, posting the whereabouts of any aircraft that broadcasts that information to all receivers is not. That's why you can find this information all over the internet, the only place where you currently can't find Musk's jet is on Twitter. And that's before we get into his free-speech arguments which apparently were a bit inconsistent.
Or would you like to accuse the FAA of doxing as well?
I don't see how it's any different from a public figure saying they'll be attending any public event.
I know people wish this weren't the case, but your address isn't exactly private information. Anyone can find it easily for anyone else.
So the bar for doxing is definitely a low one, but in this particular case it isn't met. I can see why Musk is irritated that that account exists, even more so because it didn't go away at the first request by someone as powerful as him, and that makes it personal. See the whole saga with that diver for a typical response. But that doesn't mean that the person manning that account is doing something illegal and that is the bar which Elon Musk himself set not all that long ago, and which is what makes this news.
If he had been a bit smarter about this he would have just said: "I'm irritated by you, this is my site and you're gone". That would be that. But now there are all these logical pretzels why this is illegal and all that other stuff that people - and Musk - do on twitter is not because 'free speech'. The two are incompatible, and he knows it.
And in the case of Musk, secondary issues arise, such as the fact that in the US lawsuits can be commenced for almost any reason, and how Musk's tremendous wealth, power, and social influence allows him to hold others hostage to his whims and malleable ethical positions.
The main criterium for Twitter rules changes appears to be whether or not Elon is personally inconvenienced. Which is fine by me but then he should drop the 'free speech' act and stop pretending that he understands the degree to which the former team managed to eke out the closest workable compromise on uniting free speech whilst still having a legal and functional website. That coin does not seem to have dropped yet.
Principles such as absolute free speech only mean something if you uphold them even if you are personally inconvenienced.
> Every person who, with intent to place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family, by means of an electronic communication device, and without consent of the other person, and for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment, by a third party, electronically distributes, publishes, e-mails, hyperlinks, or makes available for downloading, personal identifying information, including, but not limited to, a digital image of another person, or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person, which would be likely to incite or produce that unlawful action, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail, by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
really didn't expect my initial comment to lead to a shitstorm...
This would cover LibsOfTikTok, but not ElonJet
If they published personal information the person didn't want put in the public eye, that would be a very different story.
> LoTT re-uploads video content
This is not at all what LoTT does. That's what the LoTT TikTok did, but it was banned on TikTok. Current things that LoTT twitter account is posting about are:
And was repeatedly suspended from twitter for (incorrectly) claiming a hospital were doing hysterectomies on kids, resulting in bomb threats at said hospital, and then doing it again."re-uploading content users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing" is a misrepresentation of the account.
Taylor Lorenz doxxed LoTT (not even debatable here with the article even being edited to remove some of the doxxed links). Speaking about this and the public journalist who did it to you certainly seems appropriate.
As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
> Over the 3-year study period, a total of 204 gender affirmation surgical cases were identified: 177 chest/top and 27 genital/bottom surgeries (Table 1). Most cases were masculinizing chest reconstructions 177/204 (86.8%) with 65/177 (36.7%) of those patients being less than 18 years of age.
> The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9000168/pdf/jcm...
Whether or not they are newsworthy or appropriate, information about Roth and Lorenz clearly isn't "video content the users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing". If you want to change your argument, feel free, but don't accuse me of misrepresentation and then lie.
Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
> As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
No I was not. A hysterectomy is not a chest surgery, and the hospital doesn't provide them to children (https://archive.vn/7R44e). The hospital may provide some services to children, but hysterectomies aren't one of them. Again, do not misrepresent my comments.
I'm a bit confused by this.
I have just checked Libs of Tiktok's Twitter feed and only found two tweets referencing Yoel Roth, one bemoaning the fact that LoTT is receiving threats and that if it were Roth it'd be national news[1], and another[2] from November the 4th flagging a tweet to him and wondering why it is still up.
Where is LoTT doxxing Roth?
As to the stuff circulating about Roth, it was all public to begin with, right? I certainly don't wish any threats to come his way but that's threats and harassment, not doxxing. Maybe I missed something.
[1] https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602978234345431040
[2] https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1588338910815342592
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602188311099019265
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602179892346585090
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602147621698957312
And more, all recent. You're correct, I guess that I should have said "harass" not doxx, but yeah there's tons of stuff LoTT is doing to stoke harassment at Roth (like imply he's a groomer: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1601778632552484865)
Still, no one should be in fear because of their legal speech - that makes it unfree - whether that's Roth or LoTT or Musk or anyone else, but I don't see that those tweets would be liable for that.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2010/11/20/student_teacher/
It doesn't exactly take amazing Google fu to find infinite examples of straight women talking about how men holding babies are hot: https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=men+holding+babies+se...
I don't know if the tweet qualifies as harassment, but it's certainly making entirely baseless allegations that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types.
Roth has a lot of tweets that would provide context that invites raised eyebrows, especially given his PhD dissertation, and his behaviour as head of Trust and Safety, where he suppressed the #groomer hashtag, and given an overall context where people of Roth's political persuasion are hyping up drag queens dancing for children and he's actively suppressing criticism of it. That's so easy to explain.
I also might add that women have a biological urge to give birth and take into account the male's skills as a father. To say that (some or all) gay guys have this may be true but it seems a stretch, and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM? At the very least, his tweets are utterly stupid and reckless. If a headteacher tweets "wow, women are hot but women holding babies, extra hot!" wouldn't you pause? How about if he tweets out from his main account "I have a secret dirty twitter account", you wouldn't raise an eyebrow? Please.
As to "that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types", firstly, that could be said of anything, though we do have another spectrum, running from (to a reasonable person) non-threatening through marking out undesirables to directly threatening. The marking can lead to actual threatening situations, like before a genocide, but they also overlap with valid criticism, and since we're not in a genocide situation I struggle to see how the tweets in question reach that bar. Find something that says "we should kill paedos" from LoTT and you'll have a much stronger case, otherwise you've taken up a position where you're arguing against someone who's against paedophilia, simply because they're a political opponent. That's how this endless cycle continues.
> and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM?
At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
What a strange way to misinterpret something long winded. Should I have written more for you, or do you think that your preconceived notions would render that effort as moot as it is now?
> At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
b) He was writing about letting underage children onto Grindr for some nebulous reasons around that time:
> accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
I can think of better ways for teenagers to connect than a hookup app. Can't you?
c) American date format is idiotic, I'm not interested enough to decode them all, perhaps you could do it for me as you're so precise with what others have written.
>a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements', so you will have to check this for yourself.
What’s wrong with Twitter? Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat... Mastodon?
You know, social networks that aren’t hookup apps for over 18s. Just a thought.
> I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements'
His pronouncements count as his pronouncements. Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you. This seems like a fairly basic point. If you're living in a small town, you're not going to be able to easily find other queer people near you on any of those apps.
But why do you think that teens will be magically be safer on Snapchat or other such apps? This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
>Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
Because they're not full of men explicitly looking for hookups.
> This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
Yes, it's not that Roth was making an argument indistinguishable from what a paedophile might write, nor that if he'd said it about heterosexual children and Tinder the same logic would apply, it must be that everyone against him is bigoted!
You already tried that earlier on in the thread and it sounded just as desperately idiotic then given that it required completely missing the example given of the headteacher, or just noticing what is obvious.
Rather than seeing bigotry where it's convenient - or claiming you see it - try reading the arguments put to you and coming up with something that is cogent.
> > Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
> In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
It's not, but again, if it's inconvenient to answer then don't.
> Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you.
Users on all those apps have bios and can share their preferences and location, all the apps have search. You managed to meet people with less apps, less people on the internet, worse search etc. If there's a real need for this, someone can build it. As Roth himself points out, there probably isn't, but then he skips on to letting children into Grindr formally. Is noticing non sequiturs also bigotry? Do let me know.
The irony here is that you seem to basically agree with Roth. That is, you are fine with gay teens meeting each other via apps, but think that these apps should be age appropriate. For some reason you seem to think that Grindr is super scary, even though people do the exact same stuff on it (chat and share photos) that they do on Snapchat, Insta, or any number of other apps used by teens. An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting, would probably be *safer* than many existing apps. Snapchat, for example, will happily let you send nudes or other explicit imagery that can could quite easily be automatically blocked in the majority of cases.
By the way, if you think that Snapchat isn't full of 'men explicitly looking for hookups', I have news for you...
There are lots of blokes who like porn on Twitter and on Pornhub but to say that they're the same because of that would be an enormous stretch.
> An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting,
No, Roth suggested that Grindr allow minors and be made age appropriate, without giving any details of how that would work. Those two things, like Twitter and Pornhub, are not the same thing.
> If you’re correct that Snapchat etc. can be used to search for nearby queer people in the same way as Grindr,
Again, not the same. You can find what you want via search but apps like Grindr and Tinder are optimised for meeting people nearby for hookups and dating.
> that only goes to undermine your argument that teens will somehow be safer on one than the other
What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr? If you're on Grindr, can others find you too, and is that easier than on Twitter?
Sure, he didn’t give any details of how it would work, but it’s not that hard to imagine what kind of changes you’d make (e.g. automatic blocking of explicit images, stricter moderation of language on profiles…). This was just one paragraph of a thesis, so I’m not sure what your point is re the lack of details.
> apps like Grindr and Tinder are optimised for meeting people nearby for hookups and dating.
Yes! That was exactly my point. Gay teens want to date just like straight teens do, but it’s less easy for them to find suitable people on regular social networks.
>You can find what you want via search [on Snap]
What makes you so sure? I assume you don’t spend your free time searching for gay teenagers in your neighborhood on Snapchat, so what is your basis for this assertion?
> What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr?
I don’t know about twitter, but it’s certainly pretty high on Snapchat or Insta. A restricted version of Grindr could potentially impose much stricter limits on under 18s interacting with adults than any of the major social networks do.
A thesis isn't somewhere anyone worries about needing to cut words to fit a limit, quite the opposite, and yet he leaves us hanging with something that sounds questionable. Much like his tweets, that one about getting a crying infant mixed up with the sound of porn comes to mind. Defending that is not a hill I'd like to die on.
> > You can find what you want via search [on Snap]
> What makes you so sure?
Roth says so:
> While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat.
There's a reason why the majority of young gays are using those instead, just as the rest of us use general networks too.
> > What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr?
> I don’t know about twitter, but it’s certainly pretty high on Snapchat or Insta.
It seems the search works okay then. What is the relative chance you'll find a teenager vs an adult when searching for a teenager? (On a service that is for general users vs one stocked with over 18s)
> A restricted version of Grindr
Just why? If I knew some straight kids that were finding it hard to date, my advice to them would not be "hey, perhaps you should try adult hookup apps", or upon finding out that children like to sneak into adult spaces "you know what, we should just make it safer for them". No, they should stay out of adult spaces and adults that argue for their introduction should be questioned as to what on Earth they are thinking.
"You know that place where guys and gals go to meet?"
"Like clubs?"
"Yeah. You know that sometimes there's underage girls there"
"Of course. Got to be careful."
"You know what we should do to keep them safe, let them in!"
Try saying that amongst any group of blokes I know and you'll get called a paedo immediately. Maybe jokingly, maybe not, but no one's writing a thesis about it and expecting to get away with it. Except for academics, apparently.
The thesis wasn’t about creating dating apps for queer teenagers, so that’s why he doesn’t say much on the subject. Remember that this paragraph was picked out by people desperately trolling for anything that could be used to smear him. You seem to suggest at several points that this thesis is entirely about young queer people (“no-one’s writing a thesis about it”), but you’ve been misled on that point.
The rest of your post is frankly too much of a mess of mischaracterization to respond to. (To take only the most egregious example, I think you must recognize that Roth does not say that Snapchat is good for finding other queer people in one’s local area in the section you quote.) You’re becoming so oddly insistent on Snapchat’s utility as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app that you’re even undermining your own implied conspiracy theory. Why would Roth even care about luring young gay guys onto Grindr if he can find legions of them in his neighborhood on Snap? Snap already allows under 18s.
In my analogy, Roth is arguing that we allow children into adult nightclubs because they sneak in, not that we have separate clubs for them.
And it's I, not Roth, who already argued for "youth clubs". To quote myself “If there's a real need for this, someone can build it.” He makes no such pronouncement.
There's only 3 choices for where to put young people:
1. general apps
2. adult-only apps
3. youth-only apps
He made the case for 2, I'm anti-2 and suggest 1 or 3. Very simple, try to keep up.
> The thesis wasn’t about creating dating apps for queer teenagers, so that’s why he doesn’t say much on the subject.
I don't care. He writes just enough to be questionable and not enough to be defensible.
> You seem to suggest at several points that this thesis is entirely about young queer people (“no-one’s writing a thesis about it”), but you’ve been misled on that point.
As I wrote above, I have a copy of the thesis, I haven't been misled, you've just continued to display a wilful inability to read my comments.
> The rest of your post is frankly too much of a mess of mischaracterization to respond to.
And yet you do. This will be fun and ironic.
> You’re becoming so oddly insistent on Snapchat’s utility as as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app
That's weird because I've barely mentioned Snapchat. I've mentioned it once myself, and as a general app, not as "as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app". You have have mentioned it 10 times. Hence, every other time I've mentioned it has been quoting you.
Do you actually read the responses you get?
> you’re even undermining your own implied conspiracy theory
We're talking about Roth, a single person, there cannot be a conspiracy. I can see now why you reacted so strangely to the use of "pronouncement". Please, pick up a dictionary and use it.
> Why would Roth even care about luring young gay guys onto Grindr if he can find legions of them in his neighborhood on Snap?
I can think of several reasons why someone sexually interested in under 18s would want that:
- convenience
- self selection by the target demographic
- plausible deniability
- grooming
More difficult on a general app. In addition, when he was in charge of moderating a general app, he suppressed use of the word groomer. So many strange coincidences.
But that would be to miss the point as badly as you are wont to do. The point is, it seems perfectly reasonable to question his pronouncements and behaviour.
Great, so you can see its utility for queer teenagers then (who as a general rule are likely to be sexually interested in people around their own age).
I can also see the sexual utility for underage girls and boys if they let underage girls and boys into nightclubs but I wouldn't advocate that as nightclubs are adult spaces. Same goes for Grindr and Tinder et al.
Is what you're proposing a common position amongst gay men?
>Is what you're proposing a common position amongst gay men?
What is it that you take me to be proposing? Also, whatever it is, how would I know if it's a common position among gay men?
Or is it that you're just dogwhistling "Are all gay men pedos?" – in which case, the answer is no.
"While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults."[1]
[1] https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=377...
There’s a reason gays use Grindr, because they have a sexual preference and want to meet others with that sexual preference for sex. If they wanted to just chat they could go on Twitter and, you know, chat with anyone - gay or not - because it’s general purpose. Is it difficult to find gay people on Twitter?
If some bloke starts writing that we should let young girls on Tinder because they already use it and, god forbid they could just use Twitter for a chat, it’s too general purpose, they need a hookup app for interaction, feel free to label him a paedo too because that’s what it sounds like.
Sweeney isn't on the same level at all. He's tracking jets. Airports are full of security. The last time Internet posts led to an attack on an airplane was never, unless we're counting al-Qaeda's private message infrastructure.
Was this the case with the stalker? From what I can tell the airplane landed the day before, and I haven't seen any evidence that the incident occurred near the airport.
This is not how law works.
We've had to ask you this more than once:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629700 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21499309 (Nov 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342820 (March 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14610460 (June 2017)
I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps up, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Twitter may be a private entity but the lawsuit is clearly meant to stifle the distribution of public information. Now that he owns one of the largest social media platforms used to distribute stuff like CALFire emergency announcements, that jet information is not only already public but arguably that information is now in the public interest
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pu...
Unfortunately this means enterprising billionaires might be able to forum shop the SLAPP lawsuit to states where it’s less likely to bite them later.
IANAL and genuinely curious, how much further can Musk shop around? To the state Sweeney’s corp is in (if he has one)? Does some random court in Kansas or whatever have the jurisdiction to slap a meaningful injunction against someone who’s never stepped in the state? I doubt Musk would be able to actually recover any funds that way but again IANAL and I’m curious. Can he make this federal?
Musk is literally trying to sue a twenty year old college student. Might as well try bleeding a rock. Is Musk so out of touch that he really thinks that he can get anything but a pyrrhic victory?
Again, I’m asking about the jurisdiction which decides whether Sweeney will have anti-slapp to defend him. If so, Musk’s case can get dismissed with prejudice at the first hearing and the courts in some states will even fine him for wasting everyone’s time.
Getting sued by Musk will hopefully be a less giant pain in the ass than without an anti-SLAPP statue. But it still could be quite painful. And just the threat of the lawsuit is pain on its own and may have a chilling effect on both the target and others.
Yeah, ouch. I had thought the legal process could be terminated sooner but the defendant in the first case study Hill v. Heslep et al still had over $100k in legal fees (which they were awarded after winning the anti-SLAPP motion), though that seems to have had a complicated second prong due to California’s new revenge porn laws.
I hope Sweeney opens up a legal defense fund and Streisands Musk to victory.
It would be a worthy cause, a very high profile case, and (depending on the jurisdiction) a not-insignificant chance of recovering fees. I'd be willing to bet Sweeney won't have to front the cash for his defense. But, again, if he does, it's a pot I'd throw some money into.
That’s pretty monstrous.
If there is a kidnapping or murder down the line, your money will have helped enable it.
Donating to a doxxer with the knowledge that their work has already played a role in leading a stalker to the target’s young child is monstrous. Full stop.
To my knowledge most cars don’t have tail numbers, and don’t register their flight plan with the FAA, so I don’t really understand the connection you’re drawing.
* The discussion is in a thread about SLAPP, with the point of contention being that Elon is suing to intimidate rather than for damages
* Elon has, in the past, implicitly and explicitly demonstrated approval of such activities
* It is unclear whether the information led to the attack
That, plus that fact that the money is not going to run the account directly, but pay for legal fees in the court case.
There's a lot of discussion here on all these topics. Ignoring them completely and jumping immediately to a conclusion that lets you call someone a horrible person is not reasonable or responding in good faith. You can make your point and disagree without lowering the quality of discussion.
If any of {"the information is public/protected under the First Amendment", "Elon is suing to harass this person", "Elon is just straight up lying about the incident", "the attack has nothing to do with the account", "this is something Elon actually said he supports in the past"} are true the point being made changes dramatically. I don't think any of them have been settled at all. I'm sure 'AlchemistCamp has opinions on them as do I but in situations like these it's generally appropriate to make comments taking this uncertainty into account. Like, it could even be a curious comment, "it seems like this person's account is actively harming Elon's family, why would you possibly want to send money to fund it?", but as it stands right now it just jumps immediately into making the conversation worse.
On the flip side, I feel the problems in my comment, which I freely accept (…though not as bad faith), do not actually significantly alter its meaning. Nor do I think it ignores surrounding context like the comment I replied to did. My point was "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person's actions" and I wrote "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person" and I feel that this is something a reasonable person could end up doing, even if it's obviously not correct. Perhaps I'm missing what led you to focus on that part in particular, rather than the rest of the comment, where I feel the meat of it lies?
1) Contrary to your initial claims, I made an ethical criticism of a a behavior not a person (and even explicitly clarified this in a sibling comment)
2) The discussion about SLAPP was an off-topic tangent to the primary conversation of the account suspension and the security risks the anti-doxxing rule addressed
Bringing the discussion from the tangent thread to the primary topic is an improvement, not a worsening of the discussion.
3) Your implication that I “cruised over the entire” context of the thread of more than 1000 others comments to make snap posting is false on two counts. There were fewer than 1000 comments at the time and I actually had read over a hundred and already commented elsewhere first.
4) My position isn’t even close to extreme. Funding someone who is regularly de-anonymizing and broadcasting people’s real-time location coordinates against their wishes, despite being fully aware that doing so presents a security risk is morally reprehensible to many, many people—an important bit of context you yourself seem to have worked hard “to ignore”, in your own terminology.
You’ve made repeated made long-winded, meandering complaints about my critical 3-sentence comment, but at the least you’ll have to grant my comment didn’t make untrue assumptions about the other poster’s process of reading the thread, their frame of mind, their good faith in approaching the discussion, their reasoning process or their opinions.
I criticized only the specific course of action the commenter said they were planning.
Actually, if you came into the comment thread where a dozen people were already discussing this possibility, and just left a reply to one of the comments of something along the lines of "oh I guess Google thinks social is too hard, they want to focus on Android now"…that's kind of weird, right? This thread was operating under the assumption that Elon was basically lying, and trying to intimidate the ElonJet guy. The person who was going to fund him was clearly doing it because he thought he was giving money to the little guy standing up to the SLAPP abuser. When I said you waltzed in it's that you just came with "I believe every single word from Elon's side of the story and this happens to mean that you are funding a terrible thing". That was not the assumption that this thread was operating under. You can disagree with that assumption but you didn't go "guys why do you even think this is a SLAPP lawsuit?", you went "why are you funding a doxxer who might murder children". How is this an improvement to the discussion?
Objection, Your Honor, assumes facts not in evidence.
This knowledge doesn't exist. It's asserted without evidence.
I disagree with all of your factual assumptions, so I then disagree with your moral conclusion.
You can call me monstrous if you want. I frankly don’t care about your opinion of me at all. I’m happy to discuss my moral framework with you if you want, but we’re so far apart on the factual basis that I don’t think it’d be worth the time.
Tracking the movements of wealthy targets in real time has zero value in terms of political freedoms. It’s primarily of use to kidnappers and other criminals. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a security risk.
I mentioned factual disagreement, and those still exist. Without conceding any of those, this is our moral and philosophical disagreement. I don’t think the power of the state should bar all speech that you personally decide has 0 political value.
I think the first amendment rightly tolerates speech, even speech that many people strongly disagree with. I think the government should be extremely hesitant about telling people they can’t speak because their words have “zero political value”.
And I would vigorously oppose a party who is attempting to use the government to punish someone for speaking.
Look, if Elon Musk brings an action that alleges very clear defamation, or if he shows that Sweeney was actively inciting harassment I’d consider otherwise. But if the legal action is only for the actions publicly alleged (posting flight information), that’s simply protected speech by the first amendment. A lawsuit to suppress clearly protected speech is legal thuggery, and I would vigorously oppose that lawsuit.
In much the same way I’ve donated to the ACLU who has stood up for the rights of people I despise to speak.
I get where you’re coming from, though. Replace “Elon’s location data” with “Elon is horrible” or “we should tax billionaires at 99%” and I’d also support the right to broadcast it far and wide.
As is absolutely you right! And, were this more private data (like the location of his car being published), I’d be much closer to agreeing with you position.
I think the SCOTUS position on “reasonable expectation of privacy” is not great for taking into account the way our panopticon is able to process so much data that used to be public, but hard to gather at scale.
I’d be pretty willing to be convinced that we should have a serious discussion on the merits and drawbacks of significantly expanding privacy rights, to make some of that illegal.
That being said, the movements of airplanes are inherently public information right now, and already public “at scale”, so I just don’t see a world where I’d agree that aircraft movements should be a part of that framework.
> the belief that the US 1st amendment actually does protect it.
This is a less subjective claim, and is just not accurate. The first amendment absolutely allows someone to publish that information. It’s published publicly by the government! The first amendment absolutely unambiguously protects that information currently.
Musk needs to go after the stalker. He deserves a good SLAPP'ing. Fuck billionaires trying to buy their way to immunity to the consequences of their own daft behavior.
Let me be more specific:
What does your comment mean, with regards to the context it is in? What specific things make what you are contending true?
"Courts struck down anti-SLAPP laws in Washington and Minnesota, and Washington enacted an updated law
Courts in Washington and Minnesota struck down their states’ anti-SLAPP laws, finding them unconstitutional under their respective state constitutions. As discussed above, however, Washington enacted an updated anti-SLAPP law in 2021 that addressed the concerns of the state supreme court.
In 2016, a Minnesota appellate court similarly found that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional, finding that the law “deprive[s] the non-moving party of the right to a jury trial by requiring a court to make pretrial factual findings to determine whether the moving party is immune from liability.” Mobile Diagnostic Imaging v. Hooten, 889 N.W.2d 27, 35 (Minn. Ct. App. 2016). The following year, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed, finding that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional as applied to claims alleging torts because it requires a district court to make pretrial factual finding in violation of the plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury under the Minnesota constitution. Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minn., 895 N.W.2d 623, 637–38 (Minn. 2017). These decisions raise concerns that courts in other states that recognize a plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury may follow suit."
From that, I don't know that it's reasonable to conclude that "they likely can't protect Sweeney at all", but IANAL.
The only bad faith argument here is claiming publishing publicly available information is somehow endangerment.
What where the causes? How can we prevent this from happening again? What do other high profile perons do to prevent this from happening?
Elon loves to shove himself front and center into the public eye and to stoke a fanbase. Large groups of people inevitably contain some crazy ones. Obsessive para-social relations often lead to unhinged fans stalking or harassing the targets of their obsession. This is so common it has a term coined by Eminem: "Stan".
> How can we prevent this from happening again?
Celebrities are often stalked not just by fans but by reporters. Princess Di was arguably put in a situation by photographers which led to a car crash and her death. It appears the solutions are either:
(1) Don't be famous, or be the type of famous person that has a low profile (there are a lot of them)
(2) If you are a billionaire then you can afford a security detail -- get one
(3) Support real mental health efforts and legislation which funds support for people with mental health issues, instead of sticking them in prison or making them live on the street
The only defense against stalkers is to avoid being stalked or to physically prevent them from stalking you. What is your solution?
Elon's case isn't exactly average even among the ultra-rich.
Not defending the ban, but the context is a bit more complex than posting something off of a public site onto twitter.
To me it doesn't just feel like extortion, it straight up is extortion.
https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker#toggle-gdp...
Edit: looked this up apparently Elon offered him 5k which he rejected and asked 50k instead. So I guess neither have the moral high ground.
So Elonjet taking the information publicly available, sharing it, and people "harassing" Elon is similar enough.
Again, before Elon bought twitter the narative was that twitter as a private platform could ban anyone they wanted for no reason at all, so if that logic was reasonable then it should be reasonable now.
This is incorrect.
And I think Lil Nas X can handle his own.
color me skeptical this is the actual story. he’s been very annoyed by that account for years
So not sure how Musk thinks it's related.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zygg/twitter-bans-elon-mus...
"Sweeney has been using sites such as ADS-B Exchange to track the movements of private jets blogging to celebrities, tech billionaires, and Russian oligarchs for years now. By law, the movement of these plans is publicly available information. “This account has every right to post jet whereabouts, ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even AF1 (@AirForceTrack) Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well,” the account’s pinned tweet read before it was banned."
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.
If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.
I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.
To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.
1: See GeoWizards fantastic series doing exactly this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...
Bottom line is: there is no justifiable reason to publish real-time location info of somebody against his wishes other than to harm him.
The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.
Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.
Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.
Where is the real-time data on Putin & Biden's whereabouts then?
> what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth
What does that has anything to do with his location?
> free speech
Talking about and inviting others to do harm could very well be free speech, but that doesn't make the ones doing it less of a--holes.
His location is a hint to who he's talking to and what he's doing.
There has been no invitations to do harm. It's not about who's an asshole or not - it's about who's a hypocrite on free speech.
Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.
This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.
Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.
I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.
> document for sharing
Google "Docs"-ing.
Now I get it.
There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.
Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.
I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).
But that's not what was said - there was no exception carved out for that.
The solution to people knowing the location of your private plane is really simple: Don't own a private plane. Most of us are already doing it.
That is of course the better solution. There's something perverse about the entire concept of a private plane.
Still, as much as I dislike his descent into madness, I do understand Musk's safety concerns here.
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?
Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.
Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.
I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.
However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.
> Musk has also apparently requested, via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that his plane not be tracked on third-party sites like FlightAware ... “This aircraft is on the the FAA blocklist meaning it is not allowed to be displayed to the general public,” a FlightAware spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “This is something that all 3rd party trackers do usually follow as a list is sent out every month."
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
ADSBExchange does not participate in the program that the blocklist is part of. They even cover this on their homepage
https://www.adsbexchange.com/
> First and foremost ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!
ADSB Exchange can't get around ICAO anonymizing just by looking at the transponder data.
> Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code.
You can no longer claim it's public. It was de-anonymized in some way.
It's no longer a case of reposting public information but someone going considerable lengths to post this information.
The @ElonJet guy even bragged about it:
> Elon got PIA but I've already identified it!
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
Registered owner: FALCON LANDING LLC at 1 Rocket Rd, Hawthorne, CA.
Google Maps known businesses at 1 Rocket Rd: SpaceX and Onsite Dental (huh?)
That’s not how you do anonymous.
His plane registration is not anonymized and is well-known[1].
1. https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
Jack Sweeney's efforts to deanonymize the plane could be seen as inciting the following of Musk's two year-old child and the ambush of their vehicle.
If the deanonymisation that Jack Sweeney is said to be doing can be argued to be a protected form of free speech, it must also be open to inquiries over whether it is incitement towards violence now that it has resulted in a plausible threat to a life.
Frequently people use combinations of difficult-to-find publicly available information and educated guesswork to locate people and then repackage this information as a "dox" for their followers. Not all of their followers have good intentions and even if they don't literally tell people to intimidate/scare/attack their target, they must eventually be seen as somewhat liable for the actions of their followers once they're aware of them. (Isn't this similar to the argument made about Trump's tweets before he was banned?)
Hopefully, as a private company, Twitter can establish sensible public policy about what speech is allowed or banned and where these lines are.
Can I find this in the Twitter TOS?
Also, this application of the rules is completely in line with original policy about inciting harm, and as a private company, Twitter is well within their right to deplatform users that don't follow their rules.
What seems capricious to many right now might actually be even-handed enforcement of pre-existing rules towards people that had gotten used to special treatment. And if it's not even-handed I don't see how anything has changed from before, where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed.
"where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed."
Whataboutism.
There are written rules about inciting harassment and posting private information/locations without express approval. Ignorance of the rules shouldn't excuse people from following the rules.
It's not whataboutism to point out that these policies existed previously, and that if there are any differences at all it's that the rules weren't always applied for this violation previously. The fact is, certain Twitter accounts used to get a free pass -- I feel like the modern adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" applies.
(Do I believe what I'm saying? Basically, it's one way of looking at things and I think that while this interpretation of the rules and their application is unproven and counter-narrative it is a viable argument that I expect Twitter to make as the new moderation team grows.)
Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.
More info: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
I know nothing about this, but was a rabbit hole to explore.
The tail number for his plane is well known. If you put that N-number into an ICAO conversion script (https://www.avionictools.com/icao.php), you get the same Hex number that you see from adsbexchange.com. From what I can tell, the script is using an algorithm and not doing a DB lookup. So, just based on the tail number, you could figure out the canonical ICAO code for the plane.
The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
In order to address this privacy shortcoming, the PIA program exists. This would change the ICAO for the plane to be disconnected from the tail number. But from the tracking website, it seems like the ICAO number for his plane hasn’t been changed/anonymized(?!?). So either, they haven’t actually gotten the new ICAO number installed (after 10-ish months), or the plane isn’t eligible to be part of the program. PIA requires the plane to only fly domestically and have the right kind of transmitter. If the plane flys internationally, it can’t have an anonymized ICAO number.
See: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Otherwise, I don’t see how anyone could track this particular plane if it did have a PIA ICAO identifier and you only knew the tail number.
Like I said, I don’t know very much about this, but it is a fascinating rabbit hole. Anyone want to correct where I went wrong?
I'm not sure that it does at this very moment, but public statements by Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it. It's possible Elon stopped using it because of that de-anonymizing.
> The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
Yes LADD is a different system and you're not required to follow it as a data provider. FlightRadar24 for example follows it and does not list any LADD aircraft as they use FAA's data feed which requires as it's terms of use that you follow the LADD program.
I read that too, but haven’t been able to find any source that wasn’t Sweeny on that. Without another source, I’m more inclined to believe that the plane is part of LADD, but not PIA (or isn’t anymore). And that the plane from the Sweeney tweet from February 2022 may have been another plane entirely. Maybe Musk’s plane was enrolled at one point, but it honestly doesn’t make much sense to me to have a plane enrolled in PIA.
I mean, if I had a private plane, I’d like to keep the option of flying it internationally, which you couldn’t do with an anonymized ICAO (again, according to my limited reading).
Also, given the limited number of PIA planes, it would be trivial to look for ICAO numbers that disappeared at one airport and then for a new private ICAO number to appear at the same airport. The system only makes sense from a privacy perspective if you don’t have continuous monitoring of the ADS-B transponders. As things currently exist, with a small number of PIA planes, it would be obvious to find new codes.
Even if you have PIA though, I don't thing you're restricted from flying internationally. I don't see any comment on the PIA page that says you can't fly internationally with it. Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
The FAA site made it seem like changing the codes was a non-trivial “process” that wouldn’t want to do regularly. You’d have to reprogram the transponder back to your canonical code, because other countries don’t have access to the private PIA conversion lookup tables. The private ICAO numbers might also conflict with other countries “number space”.
Maybe this is an easy thing, but most changes in aviation don’t seem “quick”.
It could be a procedural thing where after switching, the FAA won’t recognise your canonical one? That’s seems a little strange, though.
Imagine it were your child. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t change any opinions or practices when it came to personal security?
Things like libel, threats, blackmail, etc are also speech, and yet banned or restricted in some way. Social media are doing a lot of work exploring the edge cases of these, and it's possible laws need to be updated to account for the results.
[0] Years ago Musk cancelled a Tesla order from a critic. On Twitter, it didn't take him long to ban a lot of satirical accounts.
And remember, my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.
The 'won't somebody think of the children' argument doesn't play nice with 'free speech as long as it is legal'.
If Musk is so concerned about his children's privacy and safety then maybe he should stop tweeting out their whereabouts in real time himself?
The “speech” you speak of is automated broadcasting the movements of wealthy people in real-time. The primary group of people who have use for that information is kidnappers.
There’s zero connection between this “speech” and political freedoms.
Similarly, there’s a huge difference between you sharing you or your family’s location on social media occasionally on your own terms vs strangers tracking and sharing it regularly.
Nobody has any right to privacy regarding the flight movements of their aircraft, and indeed any idea in that light is antithetical to the entire principal of air traffic control and safe air travel. The idea that people would not be able to track his aircraft if this account is gone is ludicrous, as there are both other flight tracking websites, the ability in some areas to get full flight plans, and even if you're a stalker the ability to just listen into ATC radio near the routes his aircraft use.
You even have spotters who spend all their days at airports logging all aircraft and posting the results online, as they've done for decades, so there's no way for aircraft movements to remain secret for long.
By buying private jets and choosing to use them exclusively, Musk himself gave up his right to any privacy when flying on them. He has other options, such as flying commercially or chartering aircraft, as others in his position have done, but has chosen not to use them. He's now trying to change the rules for everyone else to carve out an exception for himself and other super wealthy individuals.
It's rank hypocrisy and bullying and I'm amazed so many people on HN are supporting him in this, and choosing to believe him rather than reading up on how open this data already is.
That doesn’t mean somebody putting those pieces of information together and regularly tweeting your movements isn’t creating a security risk for you. The choice that you make to buy a car or drive it in public also doesn’t mean that you have to welcome automated stalking.
This account wasn't even 'putting those pieces of information together', he was tweeting it directly from ADSB Exchange, one of a number of collators of ADS-B Out data.
Aircraft movements are not private and haven't been for decades. If you want privacy in your air travel, don't fly everywhere on 1-3 well known private jets.
That said it's just as legal for Musk to kick anybody he wants out of his new club house and even be a hypocrite about it.
I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids. As a social media icon he's basically worthless to the world.
That was never going to happen. It's just a way to get people to work their asses off to further his real goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. Ironically, buying Twitter may well end up undoing that.
Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”
Previous strategy to appeal to tech was to pick last week's top post on /r/iamverysmart and state it as his philosophy.
Current strategy now that tech has soured on him the past few years, is transitioning to parroting fascist dogwhistles.
In two years he buys Whole Foods and will be ranting about holistic lifestyle chakra healing.
https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595506087570333696
That is pretty literal
In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.
If Lucy pulls away the football 27 times, you aren't required to go running at it the 28th.
But I expect there's something particularly poignant about the moment of death.
So to me, Musk's inaccuracy about that detail is very significant.
It was relevant to an election Biden was about to become the President. The hookers and meth was there to entertain the more base urges of audience.
It's mostly about Twitter fabrication of Hunter Biden was hacked (discovered during laptop dissembly) and the connections between federal government and Twitter's staff.
I'm grateful I was spared from H. Biden wang.
Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.
> Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI.
Sure but he had connections, and way to pull those images. See twit #8.
Yeah, obviously those pictures and associated tweets are deleted. That is why we are here. However, those are archived in WaybackMachine(archive.org). Copy/paste those links there.
So a picture of a link, of a deleted tweet, you have to access via Internet Archive, that's also deleted.
You know links are usually click and go, not transcribe, click, go back, go to Internet Archive and try there. Then do some internet sleuthing.
Still this isn't a case of they posted links to materials. Anyone that wants to find them needs to invest some effort to actually find them.
I mean, maybe?
I don't see a masked stalker doing much of anything in that video. In fact, the masked stalked in the car seems afraid of the person doing the filming (a security guard?). Certainly not showing much aggression. The claim is that this person then got out of the car and jumped on the hood of Elon's car preventing it from moving, but that wasn't caught on video?
People have been raising these kinds of concerns to free speech absolutists like Musk for a while, but until it impacts him they are theoretical concerns that aren't as important as his principles.
If he uses this personal experience as an opportunity to empathize with others and reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then that is commendable.
Or, if he maintained his commitment to free speech in the face of personal danger to his family I would respect such a principled stance.
However, if he only bans those who might cause him (or people he likes) harm while allowing and even encouraging those who use free speech to incite harm against others then that seems hypocritical.
The fact that Musk previously said he wouldn’t ban the account, then changed his mind (apparently after a personal incident) just shows Musk changed his mind, is all.
It certainly demonstrates he didn’t think through his previous decision, suggesting it was a spontaneous comment and not a rigorous policy. Which is worrying, because publishers such as Twitter need to have a consistent and coherent moderation policy.
But it’s still relevant if we’re to decide which position we agree with, and whether Musk was “right” previously or now.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
That Musk 'changed his mind' on the one thing that he said would set Twitter apart from 'the rest' is where I have a problem: this is a matter of principle so dear that it should override his personal affairs because that is what he is on the record about. If Musk's principles only hold water as long as he isn't personally affected then I'm fine with that but then he should get off his high horse and stop pretending.
Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
There is about how you know which link to follow.
So Twitter is now unusable because elonjet has been banned? Social media companies change their policies all the time. You don't have to agree with the decision but holding it up as something so consequential is just silly.
Assuming what he said about his son being accosted is true, how could he not change his mind? Should he really not stop something that threatened his kids life because of a promise he made to internet strangers?
If he simply bans those who would cause him (or people he likes) harm but continue to allow and encourage "free speech" for those who would cause harm to others then that seems a bit hypocritical.
This includes criticizing him in various ways.
Say what you will about pre-Elon Twitter; I never heard about anyone getting their account banned for saying bad things about Dorsey.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
I don't think anyone would really care about this had he not made purchasing Twitter all about trying to save us from the evil Twitter censorship demons.
Yes, people are less accepting of things that personally are meant to spite/hurt them, even if they match their general principles. News at 11.
Besides, free speech is about sharing opinions and such, however controversial. Petty "I'll share your itinerary to the world" is not real speech, opinion, let alone an argument. It is doxxing/stalking - that the information is publicly available in aviation registers is irrelevant (lots of stalking information is: the doxxing/stalking/threatening part is extracting it from its normal location, highlighting, it and making it more public).
We need to be careful about not (unintentionally) spreading misinformation.
(Your objection to Elon is correct of course.)
That won’t stop me saying he’s a hypocrite for doing so. Does he feel so strongly about accounts doxxing “the libs?”
But no matter how you slice it, this account (and it's owner's personal account) were targeted purely because they irked Musk, and he has given zero indication that he plans to enforce this rule for basically any other account.
But Musk owns Twitter and he can pick and choose what accounts he wants to allow.
I guess it is akin to me removing unwanted comments on my blog. His site, his rules, policies and ToS.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Especially when it's not even accurate, not to mention being misunderstood:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...
Musk had no problem insinuating that Yoel Roth was a pedophile (as is Musk's style), reportedly forcing Roth into hiding.
Does Musk recognize the ramifications of what he was doing in either case? No. At any rate, it's pretty clear that the "threats to personal safety" is a mask, he clearly is fine with doxxing and threatening other people's public safety... as long as he is the aggressor, not the victim.
Maybe he should just buy another jet or two, make sure the other jet(s) are in regular use (maybe shuttling SpaceX/Tesla/Twitter/etc employees around), and make sure he regularly swaps which one he is personally using. Extremely expensive solution, but not beyond his budget.
Or maybe he should just buy himself a private jet chartering firm. An even more expensive solution, but he can probably afford that too.
Only through a manual process that sounds like it can take a month or so to complete.
Perhaps, in future, this could be solved with technology that automates generation/randomisation of Aircraft IDs, much like MAC addresses on phones and laptops are randomised to prevent tracking?
Next-generation ADS-B transponders could communicate with the FAA (or appropriate local authority) via satellite or mobile network to generate/request a new, random ID before every flight.
A small risk, and something that could be mitigated, but still there nonetheless.
The proposals to encrypt ADS-B data, being driven by corporations and wealthy individuals, are more risky in that they add key management to the mix and make it much more likely that something will go wrong and cause widespread ATC failures or aircraft going dark on ATC displays and in collision avoidance systems at critical moments. Especially as there'll be a mix of encrypted/non-encrypted transponders for decades to come.
There is also an argument for some sort of cryptographic signing of ADS-B messages in order to prevent spoofing.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
I can go on one of those websites, see all those flights, but I have no idea who they belong to or who's on board.
That changes once someone specifically links a private jet to someone.
Within the EU I'd be interested in the ramifications with regards to the GDPR.
the linking is done simply by looking up who the plane is registered to, and that is also public information.
you can of course always go the other way, look who owns a plane, and the go to flight information from there.
there is nothing private about any of the information used in the process.
I would ponder the GDPR's definition of personal data before making such definitive claim.
https://dataprivacymanager.net/who-does-the-eu-gdpr-apply-to...
That's not true.
No.
Another impulsive act despite other forces forming negative business opinions of all his impulsive actions.
He will be laughed out of court by any judge.
https://www.google.com/search?q=a835af
And if you don't have the registration that one more search. All of this information is public and that goes for pretty much all aircraft.
If the bar is 'low end stalkers that don't have internet' then yes, it will make a difference.
No way
/s
Hypocrisy
BUT he also built churches and schools in the poor neighborhood he grew up in.
So he did some really terrible things and was overall a terrible person, BUT he also did some really good things.
[1] https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start...
All evidence points to him liking to sire and not to father.
No really, what makes you believe this?
Some additional info: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/14/elonjet...
> On Wednesday evening, the account was briefly restored, with Twitter outlining new rules seemingly designed to prevent Sweeney from posting the real-time locations of planes used by Musk and other public figures as long as he included a slight delay. Sweeney, over Twitter, asked Musk how long he’d have to delay the data to comply.
> But Wednesday evening, Musk threatened to escalate the conflict against Sweeney, saying a car carrying Musk’s son, X Æ A-12, had been “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles, implying without providing evidence that location data had been a factor in the purported episode. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” Musk tweeted.
> Sweeney, 20, shared publicly available information about Musk’s flights, not his family members or his cars. The records stopped and ended at airports, and Musk has provided no further detail as to what legal basis Musk would cite in a lawsuit.
I heard that he gave his child a strange name, but... that is just something else.
On topic: I don't see how a flight location could be shown to cause that event. If I told you that I was arriving somewhere at LAX at around 0900 could you find me?
Especially since it is claimed the @elonjet account hadn't tweeted for 48 hours before the incident - difficult indeed to claim causation.
Maybe he should stop phoning home
1. This has nothing to do with the location of his private jet.
2. You can't do whatever you want, even to protect your family. Elon has a lot of power, he can't be allowed to abuse it because some guy decided to stalk him.
I am sure this will fly below the radar, however, once again shows there is no consistent moderation policy across Twitter. So far it seems Musk will only respond if it affects his own family.
Allegedly he had the chance to buy it for £50,000. It might have been more value for money than Twitter.
The slight of hand here is to conflate the car and the plane and the dates. This allows his followers to push a “it was for his child’s safety!” argument, in which yet again Elon Musk uses his children as a prop to avoid critical examination of his new story. Which, as you and others point out, falls apart due to the timing of the last tweet and the purported incident.
Also Musk isn't really trustworthy so unless this is confirmed by am independent third party there is no reason to believe the guy that moves tens of thousands of dollars to harass rescue personnel.
Even if Musk is not lying there still isn't a connection.
Edit: apparently the last data published from the elonjet account is from December 12th. Making this even more ridiculous. Not sure what I expected.
Also, his plane's data is still out there, for free.
Musk considers harm to anyone's family other than his to be necessary for Twitter revenue.
> organizations who supported harm to my family
A significant problem in Twitter and social media in general. Musk seeks to protect himself, while opening the floodgates on others for his version of "free speech" by unbanning accounts previously flagged as abusive.
A hypocrite by definition.
https://twitter.com/dataracer117/status/1519167734910619649?...
But when it starts getting that close to kids, maybe you'd start to take it more seriously too.
I have kids. This whole thing is stupid. Elon is a hypocrite.
Everyone he targets his army at gets thousands of death threats each. And Elon has a very, very, long list of past targets.
If Elon wants the death threats to stop he should stop instigating them against others.
You can't, yet you defend literal death threats just because you don't like the target.
Also he is protected by an army of lawyers so he can smoke some weed and tweet that he thinks that you @memish is a pedophile or Hunter Biden friend or MAGA supporter or whatever. And you'll get tons of death treats as result.
If your response is that it doesn't qualify, neither does reporting information about his private jet.
The leson here is more general - having a platform should be seen as a big responsibility where great care must be taken to prevent one's actions from having unintended consequences.
This is of course entirely separate from whether such info was used against Musk or his family, or whether such a possibility is sufficient grounds for attempting to silence those who make it easily accessible (it's still accessible thanks to ADS-B for anyone with basic technical skills and cares enough).
Step 2. Copy one of the tail numbers from the first result: “N628TS, N272BG, N502SX”
Step 3. Paste one of the tail numbers into any one of the flight tracker apps.
If your stalkers can’t even figure that out, you don’t have to worry about them. Otherwise… it’ll take them an extra 45 seconds compared to finding the ElonJet twitter account.
Edit: for bonus points Google “site:faa.gov elon musk registration”. First result is N628TS: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
The first blocks it from showing up on sites like flightradar24 which filters out LADD aircraft.
The second makes it so you can't go from tail number to tracking the aircraft once the ICAO has changed and ADSB Exchange doesn't manually update their database of which pseudonymous ICAO numbers are connected to which tail numbers.
All those FAA rules do is mask it in their own public data set that they make available. Anyone with their own data set (aka an SDR at SMO if they’re trying to stalk Musk) like ADSBExchange is not required to mask that data and any law trying force them would run afoul of the first amendment and compromise aviation, since ADS-B makes flight safer for hundreds of thousands of pilots.
However on your second point you seem to be confusing two different things. There's two different systems that you're lumping together as one. The one you're talking about is LADD. Discussed here: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
FAA even caveats themselves:
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
Now to your point, you're incorrect. PIA, as mentioned in that quote by the FAA, literally changes the aircraft's ICAO number to a new number and delists it from public registries. Using an SDR or the data from ADSB Exchange only gets you that psuedonomynous ID. Once that's changed again you have to stalk someone by following them to the airport and align the takeoff time of when you know they left with the new ICAO number. That's the ethically/morally/legally quesitonable aspect about all of this.
More here on PIA: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
> In order to mitigate these concerns, FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO aircraft address program with the objective of improving the privacy of aircraft operators in today's ADS-B environment by limiting the extent to which the aircraft can be quickly and easily identified by non-U.S. government entities, while ensuring there is no adverse effect on ATC services.
Maaaybe it’s more ethically/morally questionable [1] but I don’t think it’s a legal issue. Reading more on the PIA, it still require the owner to have their own operational security. Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
[1] or in this case Musk’s actions on Twitter are less ethically/morally/legally questionable?
> Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
That's true, but that falls into the stalking or doxxing category and Twitter already had long standing terms of service statements against doxxing, even before Elon bought Twitter, even if it's not illegal (which I still have open questions about).
Musk can do whatever he wants on twitter and IANAL so what do I know, but between the public interest argument and the public availability of the information, I don’t think Musk has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That said, anyone using the information to follow him around or harass him is liable to get prosecuted.
There is nothing legally questionable about this. What part of "no expectation of privacy" do you not understand?
I was simply replying to a comment that inferred the only way flight info was useful for a stalker was if you planned on stalking them in another plane... which is obviously incorrect.