> It’s worth noting that the policy these accounts violated, a prohibition against sharing “live location information,” is only 24 hours old.
It seems like a good rule, but in this case the application of the rule seems less impersonal than it could be
Let’s try to make a comment that creates less outrage than most…
This is why it would be interesting to post public information about politicians collected from the online spyware that tracks all of us. It would rapidly motivate new laws that at least somewhat improve privacy.
This always happens when rule makers are personally affected by a problem: the problem starts getting attention
The dude is truly off his rocker now. The "rules" are whatever he makes up on the spot. He's self-destructing before our eyes...no longer the richest man in the world. Telsa stock tanking all because he can't STFU and acts like a spoiled 12 year old.
Come on now. They were linking directly to the tracker that Sweeney was banned for, not just reporting on the story about it.
It was a childish petulant doxxing on purpose and they got treated the same as Sweeney.
If you are sure of yourself, do a little experiment. If you truly believe it’s legitimate, why not just buy an AirTag and hide it on a person’s car…perhaps a local well known business owner. Create a website that publishes the live location of the vehicle. Let us know here how that goes for you.
The simple fact of the matter is that due to how this data is created, it's publicly accessible information: All airplanes flying in civilian airspace are required to broadcast ADS-B data for safety reasons. It gives controllers (and other aircraft in your nearby airspace) a view of what's happening. Your airplane essentially broadcasts a payload every second that sends out your GPS coordinates, heading, speed, altitude, aircraft identification information, etc.
The COOL thing (speaking as an aviation geek), is that you can buy a cheap little antenna, plug it into a Raspberry Pi and start seeing these raw packets from airplanes FLYING OVER YOUR HOUSE. FlightRadar24 and ADSB Exchange basically crowd source a bunch of real-time data from people who have these antennas and are running various types of software.
Basically, since this is happening in public view and the data is available (primarily for safety reasons), then there is really no reasonable expectation of privacy. In a way, it's like people taking a photo of you on the street and posting about it -- since you're in a public space, there is no expectation of privacy. You might not like it, morally it might feel wrong, but there is no reasonable legal reason that bans this.
Fortunately (for Elon), he is a billionaire and can lobby to change laws he doesn't like if he so wishes.
I don’t question the legal right to use this data this way, although I think good arguments could be made that if you are using the data this way, your intention is suspicious and you invite scrutiny. I am challenging the folks commenting here that the data being used this way is a positive use of the data.