> 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.
I don't know - it doesn't seem consistently applied Donie O’Sullivan published a tweet containing a statement from the LAPD and was banned; and personally I don't see it being upheld once Elon's fixation on this story wanes.
Furthermore, it just seems that Elon is doing what he accused Twitter of doing for so long; enacting arbitrary rules to silence political opponents. It's his site and he's free to ban who he wants but does he see the cognitive dissonance of how he's running the site?
I don't think so. The New York Times demonstrated this three years ago, nobody really cared: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...
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 it were an algorithm, everyone in Twitter would be banned by tomorrow. I hope it works.
He's making rules he promised not to, and we don't have to pay for the privilege to criticize that hypocrisy.
But it is certainly worthwhile pointing out the hypocrisy of his statements. When people’s words don’t line up with their actions you should be wary.
Now that he forbid people from posting links to that too: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkEg9iyUUAAUFI6?format=jpg&name=...
Doxxing isn't illegal. I thought Elon claimed that ONLY violation of national laws could be the basis for deplatforming. As if his understaffed team can make legal decisions on the spot, and output true/false about millions of tweets that fall into gray areas. They don't even KNOW the whole body of law, and they aren't the judge or jury either.
I had two discussions with Noam Chomsky about how capitalism has co-opted Freedom of Speech, just like it has done with Women's Lib and many other things
In 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HovxY1qBfek
A year later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
The airspace of a place is a commons, what happens in the commons is everyone’s to know.
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.
Plus he's a public personality, so not really concerned by most of that "anti-doxxing" rule
> Sweeney said he hasn't received any notification of legal action, and the last time his bot tweeted anything was Dec. 12, "which is not last night, so I don’t get how that’s connected.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-suspe...
Did you really create a new account just to spread misinformation?
This approach won't solve the problem. Especially for a celebrity. Twitter's censorship was dumb before, but this is equally or even dumber by being so prominent and kicking the bees nest.
People making bomb or mass shooting threats get arrested all the time. You shouldn't have people fear for their lives.
Elon Musk himself argued this exact specific thing is included.
Nov 6, 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456: "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk"
We've established now that Elon really doesn't like it when people dox him, and all his right-leaning supporters are defending that.
Well, that's a precedent now for when minorities and vulnerable people who aren't billionaires are doxxed by right wing hate groups (e.g. Kiwifarms).
And radical free speech just got abruptly limited when it got personal.
The important point should be that the principle should be applied equally, particularly since groups like Kiwifarms are much worse than ElonJet.
Or did they report about the banning of someone who reported his location?
But there’s no evidence the dangerous situation happened at all (and even the counter evidence of there being no police report). He’s previously lied about another son dying in his arms (to justify not unbanning Alex Jones) so it’s very feasible the entire incident is made up.
The last flight tracker post was several days before the alleged incident. Totally unclear what link exists between the flight tracker and the alleged incident, unless an ADS-B transponder is on the car and the car is flying.
Even if there was a link, a dedicated stalker is perfectly capable of retrieving the flight information themselves from government websites or other tracking websites. Elon hasn’t even asked for it to be restricted information - which just requires asking the FAA, most flight tracking websites voluntarily comply with the list as well, though not all. That would be a reasonable first step to make, along with privately discussing the incident with the account holder.
Some type of team at Twitter that could look at more tweets.. the resources to look at ALL of Twitter.., systematically, for these issues of “trust” and “safety”
You could the create a very clear policy, and work to remove any doubt such a policy was consistently enforced!
I know crazy idea..
Transponders are in planes mostly for safety. Their automated dissemination is part of the safety mechanisms of that transport medium and putting up with them (when required) is part of the privilege of using that public good. Similar to requiring drivers licenses to drive.
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.
Sorry, but that is a really weird justification. It seems to me that is just the type of issue that corporate boards are designed to handle without the need for vigilanteism.
You can’t actively imply people should give you and your business partners money because you physically showed up to a location and then be upset that people care where you are physically located
You can’t actively imply people give you and your business partners money because you physically showed up to a location and then be upset that people care where you are physically located
He’s described himself as one, and I can’t see a way to square the idea that he says he is a free speech absolutist with the excuse that free speech is hard to regulate in the real world. He’s either a moron or was incapable of understanding even first level consequences of his actions or he’s an actual moron
Also I should note, that nobody asked me if I think people who intentionally cyberstalk folks online using public information are slimy either…(but I do).
Do you have evidence of that? He claims they were reporting the location.
For one thing, it's different because there is no law that cars need an active transponder while operating.
But cars do have a license plate anyone is free to look at while they drive by so in that sense it's the same.
False memories are not uncommon with traumatic events like a child's death. I'd give anyone a pass on that one and give the benefit of the doubt.
If you have an objection to this tracking, you'd have to take it up with the FAA. Because the legitimate interest is that the rules require airplanes to transmit this information any anyone is free to listen to it.
Which is a great thing for aviation safety, so I'm glad the rules exist.
1. The jet’s location is publicly available by law.
2. No one knows who’s in “Elons jet”.
If Elon wants to travel private without anyone knowing he is he can simply charter a jet. This is what most celebrities do.
https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Not-Abuse-Overstating-Respon...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073
> Telsa stock tanking all because he can't STFU and acts like a spoiled 12 year old.
Uh, the whole stock market is down. Amazon is down almost as much as Tesla. 48% vs 50%.
Flights supplying Ukraine were routinely top viewed flights on that website (they were flying to Rzeszów in Poland, so there was no real risk of Russian shooting them down).
AWACS planes and tanker flying in holding patterns over Poland, Romania and Baltic Sea used to be top observed planes on flightradar24 but I should be now working not looking through flightradar24 planes over Poland ( so I will link https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-60612255 that has video of inside one of them ).
Obviously planes flying combat missions are not publishing data there. Presumably ones training in restricted airspace are not either for also obvious reasons.
> Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll.
The previous poll was bad because 3x of them were basically "No" and 1x was "Yes"
New poll is heavily leaning yes regardless
I don't think it seems like a good rule. Not only is the information public but I think it is not hard to dream up reasons why it would legitimately be in the public interest to report on the comings and goings of someone's private jet.
(I disagree with the logic in both cases.)
Are you secretly deliberately making a bad argument?
This is 2022 Twitter-brained audience, now doesn't mean 24hrs these days.
I have personally seen the claim debunked on numerous platforms almost immediately after it was made, however, I concede that someone else may not have been exposed to that yet.
ADSB Exchange even has a ‘military’ filter to focus on them.
I’m reading too much of my disbelief Elon is a good parent into that story. I think I am retroactively applying modern Elon (weird breeder thing, arguably abusive child naming, repeated attacks on his daughter) to an earlier stage of his life. And that’s also not likely fair or accurate to who Elon was at the time his son died.
The new poll with just two options is going the other way (unsuspend now). Having just two options is the right call here.
I wonder how long it'll be before Musk starts remotely shutting down the Teslas of people who say things about him that he doesn't like.
And also when they are not hypocrite flailing liars.
I wouldn't want my live location posted on the internet either, and there's a lot fewer people who want to hurt me than Musk (AFAIK, no one wants to hurt me).
My position is that I don't like his decision to ban this information, but I understand it. If, however, he is using this as an excuse to capriciously ban his enemies, that is something I don't like a lot more.
These only consistent rule on Twitter now is “don’t tweet shit that offends Elon”.
That is what everyone has been saying for years. I mean, it turns out they were wrong and Twitter was actually colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment. But censorship and targeted suspensions were defended tooth and nail by internet commenters.
Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Surely people wouldn't be so shortsighted?
To pretend that TSLA is an outlier is a bad argument.
A certain amount of skepticism is healthy, but allowing people to flood the water with BS allows them to get away with lying more often than not (people just throw their hands up and say “who knows!”). Ties go to the liar.
At a certain point you have to pay a repetitional penalty and Elon has spent more than his fair share from that account. If he’s going to claim something I’m not even going to entertain it until he proves proof.
In this context it is a bit of a reach but I don't think they're wrong, and I don't think there's a reason to expect normal workers and CEOs to follow the same logic.
These kinds of comparisons, where two vaguely similar situations are considered equal regardless of the wealth, power, or influence of the participants remind me of this quote by Anatole France:
> The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
All you get from the flight tracking websites is flights with serial numbers. There's no obvious way to know which one belongs to Musk. His jet isn't registered under his name. People had to do some sleuthing.
Edit: I think you're also implying that people who have attempted to assassinate or assassinated someone are a) rational, and b) believe they'll be caught. But often neither of those are true.
There's very good ways to guess who's in Elon's Jet.
It's easy to point out Musk's hypocrisy and shifting standards. Conservatives did the same when it was more liberal people who ran Twitter. We need to appeal to something higher than "everything is great when people who agree with me are in charge."
That's not entirely true, if someone had a copy of all of the recent tweets from one of the banned accounts, then it'd be relatively easy to check if any of them violated the new policy in any reasonable sense.
> A certain amount of skepticism is healthy, but allowing people to flood the water with BS allows them to get away with lying more often than not (people just throw their hands up and say “who knows!”). Ties go to the liar.
However, I agree with you completely here. What I disagree with was the original comment I was responding to simply declaring that he had banned them despite them not violating the policy. That statement may end up being true, and maybe that person has evidence for it, but if so they should provide it. And if they don't have evidence for it, they should say something much more like what you've said here.
I think Elon should provide evidence for his claims as well, and I'd make the same criticism of him. If you're going to ban high profile journalists who are critical of you en masse with a new rule you just enacted, you'd better publish receipts along with it, at the very least.
This is certainly not true in Europe, and in the US there's generally zero restrictions on publicly sharing any kind of PII.
Obviously it’s a different story if someone would indeed make his (and his family) real-time moves outside his jet known. But I haven’t seen that unless he announced it himself.
This isn't exactly "public flight data", in many cases it's illegally collected and published flight data.
E: I can't reply to "imnotjames" below thanks to HN ratelimits, but here you go:
It's an obvious GDPR violation, just like it'd be an obvious GDPR violation to publish a similar database but with phone IMEIs and associated locations instead of aircraft.
For example, in Europe what they're doing is strictly in violation of the GDPR.
The entirety of my sleuthing: google "site:faa.gov elon musk registration"
That gave me the tail number and ICAO code in the first result. I had no idea what I was even looking for, just that I probably needed "site:faa.gov" - it worked on the first try.
I'm working on my pilot's license so maybe I'm an outlier. I even knew that the FAA was in charge of aviation! :-)
Musk's statement was that free speech would be allowed on Twitter. And yet, here he is chilling free speech. It's not surprising. It's just also really bad. So people are up in arms that they're losing a platform that, while by no means perfect, was better for free speech than it currently is.
But what's definitely not legal anywhere in the EU is to record unencrypted radio transmissions, use it to construct a database full of PII, and distribute it like Flightradar and friends do.
E: can't reply below due to ratelimits
>Hence why I said "in the US"...
Hence why I said "in Europe"...
They're just sick and tired of the billionaire hypocrite.
Edit: that said, there could be some small tenuous grain of truth to what Musk thinks happened...
Yes, this is exactly the problem but in the opposite direction you are implying.
Musk believed that Twitter blocking the sharing of an article about ToS breaking behavior was worthy of the “Twitter Files” when the story was bad for his political opponent, but he thinks it is fine when the story is bad for him. It shows that he has no actual principled beliefs. He simply is acting in his own best interest.
Odds are people would be more willing to accept Elon’s rules if Elons’s rules weren’t a constantly moving target of whatever benefits him the most at this exact moment.
Just exactly what “responsibilities” do you perceive me to have in this discussion? Others are advocating monitoring another person’s property using technology and publishing it on the internet. I am suggesting that there is no reasonable civil reason to do so. The only “responsibility” I have here is to be true to my opinion. I stand by it.
Also, I used the term “cyberstalking” because that is exactly what it is. Here is a Wikipedia page on the term:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking
According to that page cyberstalking is the use of the internet and technology to stalk an individual and those actions “may include monitoring”.
Here is the definition of “stalk”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking
“Stalking is unwanted and/or repeated surveillance by an individual or group toward another person”
If you find fault in my definition, feel free to push an edit to those Wikipedia pages.
It wouldn't take much word association to connect the two without human involvement. It doesn't matter to the purpose of this discussion though, since Google has created this association it's available to everyone.
Also, given that the GDPR only applies to people of the EU, I'd say it, at the very least, has something to do with living in Europe, since, umm, y'know, that's where most people with citizenship in an EU county live.
It's perfectly legal under the current rules as they apply to Twitter (in the United States) but one has to wonder (now and before) if it is advisable to keep them as such.
That is the public discussion societies around the world will have.
Elon Musk highlighted this issue by falsely and strongly claiming impartiality
I mean, that particular individual is in turn weird and not okay.
But who am I to say? And what does it matter if something is weird and not okay? Lots of things fit that bill, and that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.
I also find Musk's bans distasteful. Even if he can do it.
Oh, and he's revealed himself to obviously be full of shit. As is anyone cheering him on in the name of free speech. But I guess principles only last until they get in the way of petty tribalism.
Any of these things would have put an actual stop to @elonjet, and the PIA solution would have prevented harassers from simply picking up with FlightRadar or any other tracking service.
The fact that he didn't do anything to increase his own security except for banning one of his company's users tells me this is not about personal security, but about exerting control over his company. That's his prerogative, but it's bizarre that he chooses to put up a facade instead of just adding "don't be an asshole to Elon" to the terms of service, which appears to be the actual endgame here.
You're making a false equivalence between the left and the right on this topic.
The left has said that moderating online communities is legal because of the First Amendment. They're private companies. The right then called for an end to the First Amendment as we've known it by banning private companies from moderating their platforms.
There has been no such call from the left. The left (and this thread) laments what Elon is doing, but no one is saying he's breaking a law or that he should be breaking a law. No one is calling for the government to step in.
Here’s the definition of personal data under GDPR[2] for anyone who’s curious. If this information hypothetically were to be published by a company with a European or UK connection about an EU or UK data subject and that person were to complain to their national data protection authority we might be in GDPR enforcement territory.
[1] or UK because UK GDPR is a thing even though the UK is no longer in the EU
[2] https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/personal-...
Your comment erroneously claims the reason was "for doing their jobs".
I'd recommend reading dang's comment since you have a lot of inflammatory comments in this thread.
> a company with a European or UK connection about an EU or UK data subject
If you have EU or UK data subjects, you have an European or UK connection and have entered GDPR enforcement territory.
But it's all over the net because someone, possibly @elonjet, originally figured out it was his jet and posted it online. That made it easier for people to find his jet, and that is a security concern for Musk. I'm not saying this information was originally super hard to uncover for someone who knew what to do. I'm saying there is some increased security risk now that this information is easily accessible.
I think most of us would be uncomfortable with being tracked live in his situation.
But he already made a location carve-out too: he himself posted pictures of the alleged stalker guy and a license tag. That would get someone banned under the location rule. Even if it was a day later, the incident itself happened a day later than any elonjet post I believe, so that's within his real-time timeframe.
First they aren’t “seething”, they’re not even that surprised, they’re just pointing out that the loopy billionaire was insincere the entire time.
It’s simply news when a famous person does the exact opposite of what they’ve been loudly pretending to champion for years. Man bites dog.
Well, what Twitter was doing
No. It is 100% A-OK for Ol' Muskie to ban who he wants for whatever spurious reasons he wants to post-hoc claim. It's his company, he can do that. 100%.
What people are correctly pointing out is that he rode in on his "FREE SPEECH IS GOOD" horse waving a "BOTS ARE BAD" banner, loudly proclaiming that "Only illegal speech will be banned", re-enabled a whole bunch of accounts for bigots based on bot-ridden unreliable polls, swerved hard to the alt-right lane, picked up a transphobic smoothie and blew both his feet off with a +100 Shotgun Of Hypocrisy by starting to ban people who mock, track, or report on him.
Fake news.
>You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress, not because they’re Democrat sleeper agents
They suppressed it because they were very awake Democrat agents.
>but because they don’t wanna be responsible for swaying the election because of fake news.
No they wanted to deliberately sway the election, because of their partisan alliance. You can read the story here:
Part 1: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
Part 2: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600
Part 3: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281
Part 4: Michael Shellenberger: https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/16017204550055116...
Part 5: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515
Banning people for posting a link to someone else possibly violating the rules seems like a step way too far.
The actual movies were nothing interesting, but general distaste for the move, plus a healthy dose of worry from members of Congress about the contents their own records, led to a law that explicitly penalized video stores that handed out that kind of info about their customers.
I think you're right in general that people are pretty blasé about tracking now, though.
There are websites displaying this exact same data where you can watch US Military Air Tankers in active refuelling operations with both US and other nation's aircraft in active war zones.
The security risk is entirely overblown.
All tech stocks took a dive.
You can buy the antennas for like $100 and share the data in real time with whoever you want.
tracking & pointing out grossly polluting means of travel.
market making information (musk spends more time visiting ___ faltering plant or ignoring ___. Musk makes trips to __ location, acquisition in the works)?
elon is a public figure and his movements/actions create legitimate news. same as any other celebrity or politician.
gawker did this first and that was actually stalking precise irl real time locations of celebs.
There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it’s very far from obvious.
If this was actually a security threat, the man could take chartered flights anonymously forever with a rounding error's worth of his money. Opsec is clearly not important to him.
It's the Elon show. He needs the attention and doesn't care if it's positive or negative.
Couldn't, there's no legal requirement for anyone to record and publish ADS-B transmissions.
> data that cannot easily linked to an individual (number plates are not protected by themselves)
This is incorrect, number plates of cars belonging to individuals are going to be protected in almost any context you'd be storing them in.
> This jet isn’t owned by musk, it’s owned by a company
Doesn't matter, Musk isn't the only person with a plane. I own my own plane, it gets tracked by these sites.
> Journalists (including citizen journalists) also have broad protections in European law and those must be weighed against the GDPR protections
Websites like flightradar24.com are not journalists, but data brokers. That's simply ridiculous.
>There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it very far from obvious.
No there isn't, this is crystal clear.
(My understanding was that the Twitter files did on the end not contain such evidence, but information overload … I may have lost some consensus)
Of course Musk could have simply flown commercial and bypassed the entire "problem".
Not exactly. At least here in Germany, there is established jurisprudence that Twitter and Facebook are public "town halls" for discussion and as such have to maintain some sort of freedom of speech, with the borders being set by German laws. That means that for example Holocaust denial, which is perfectly fine under US law, has to be regionally blocked for Germany, while some instances of what Twitter/FB consider to be "hate speech" under their rules still has to be made available.
The general judicial consensus in Germany is that while platforms do have a requirement to moderate discourse (e.g. to remove libel and outright Nazi content), they also aren't allowed to moderate too strictly.
Now that would be a perfect case for a lawsuit. I mean, Elon probably will do it anyway, but he will get reined in by the courts. Time for him to learn he's not above the law after all.
And I think this also shows why corporate capitalism is inherently at odds with democracy: every corporation is effectively a dictatorship, their internal economy a plan economy, its rules at the whim of the CEO. And Elon is more eager than many CEOs to abuse this power. I wonder if it's going to lead to a revolution against corporations similar to the revolutions we got against monarchs.
You are presenting these two things as if they were mutually exclusive. They are not.
I find it absurd how many people are against automated license plate readers (even privately owned ones) but simultaneously welcome the complete lack of privacy for aircraft. If someone replied, “Just use a taxi/Uber/Lyft.” in response to ALPRs they’d be downvoted into obscurity, and rightly so. But change the transport mechanism and suddenly it’s fair. The hypocrisy could not be more obvious.
A "stalker" is pretty much by definition "dedicated". Otherwise it'd just be a casual observer.
But what it most important to keep remembering is that the whole discussion of elonjet account is a distraction. Sure, it's one guy posting the data for whatever motivation he has. But it doesn't matter at all, because the source raw data is public domain information available to the whole world for free on many other air traffic websites. Even if Elon were to shut off, somehow, every website in the world, the data is literally there for the taking out of the airwaves since it is being transmitted in the clear, by government mandate.
There isn't any conceivably rational argument to claim this data is private.
It's very clearly not. Even if the Internet didn't exist, the data is there over the airwaves ready to be picked up by anyone with the slightest interest to listen.
Also notice how this applies to everyone, every airplane. Every celebrity, every politician, even every little private plane, even the president. Those are the rules. Elon isn't special and doesn't get special treatment.
> I think most of us would be uncomfortable
Uncomfortable, perhaps yes. But that's the price of being a celebrity. Paparazzi and all that. When you're unimaginably rich and famous, people track you. Happens to every famous musician, actor, etc. That's the deal. Elon doesn't get to be special.
> Fake news.
Same thing. But the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only fake news, it was completely irrelevant, because Hunter Biden wasn't running for office, and unlike Trump's children, Biden's children don't work for him. And yet the fake story was leveraged by political operatives to sway the election. After all the issues of fake news swaying the 2016 election, Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.
The problem is that people like Musk have spent ages arguing that banning fascists is bad because free speech absolutism is an important value. It turns out that free speech absolutism was never actually a value they cared about - the only thing that matters is that their guy is the one choosing the bans. If people like Musk had instead argued that platforming fascists is actually good this whole time then the discussion today would be different, but because they didn't want to publicly support fascists they had to fall back on the free speech absolutism argument, which has shattered into a million pieces.
He created this 'problem' out of nothing. It's an act. If he feared for his family's safety there are ways to tackle the problem that aren't purely performative.
So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree.
Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold?
If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial.
> Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires?
This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical.
I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.
twitter has never nor would it have ever been "a public town square"
anything owned by a private company is the literal opposite of a "public" anything.
and way more importantly, anything with a character limit of 280 characters is absolutely thoroughly inadequate to discuss the most complicated and nuanced subjects that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries with entire tomes and libraries worth of space.
How do you think people's internal motivation systems work? I don't think anyone in history ever though "oh golly I can only make up to $999 million in my life, what a bother, guess there is no point in working hard".
I think it’s self evident that very rich people have more capacity for both good and bad, as they have more power in a capitalist society. To debate further there is a debate about capitalism, and whilst I’d like to see more social democracy and less laissez faire, going beyond capitalism is not something I want to jump into…
So I think ideally you’d like to see billionaires give up their wealth voluntarily, right? That seems internally consistent.
I think your last point is a good one, particularly a good response to those on the right who are always against progressive taxation: the cash should not be the only or perhaps even primary incentive. At least for entrepreneurship.
One issue with saying “900m enough” etc. is that often billionaires (or rich folk) are really just rich on paper. If your company is private it’s not necessarily easy to liquidate, for example. And maybe sometimes you want people to “own” lots of money in the sense that they need to steward it (maybe you want them to be an Angel investor, for example).
I guess I took you away a bit from “unethical” to “how do we solve it?” And it is still valuable to have ethics that cannot be enforced, because you want to be ethical yourself and be able to advise others.
And I definitely prefer social media that support long form posts and contextual discussions instead of these weird loosely linked twitter threads.
There are interesting phenomena to discuss here, but Elon's mood swings aren't one of them.
The peak of the Mastodon migration was mid November, reportedly around 400k per week. This sounds like a lot, however a) many have moved back to Twitter due to it not being what they expected and b) Twitter has over 300m monthly active users.
There are logistical issues with illiquid assets. Everybody knows this. This is not, in my opinion, an interesting concern.
One way to help solve it is to call billionaires shitheads whenever possible.
I don't see how it could be, that seems like an entirely separate issue.
That’s why its significant. Don’t act as if billionaires are just “one of us” when it comes to influence.
I would consider billionaires some of the biggest threats to democracy and national security.
Let's see if its really that simple, reachable and affordable such that any mildly disgruntled oaf can do in an impetus.
Then Elon turns around does the same thing and suddenly they flip and claim they were always "free speech proponents" all along.
They should just be honest and admit it's all political.
But anyways, this NH post is now at 1320 comments. It's like CNN's talking heads shouting at each other.
The release of the previous management's internal communications showed the liberal and comfortable application of euphemism, justification after the fact, and technical deniability in upper leadership.
Twitter showing outage not over evidence that the culture of banning and de-amplifying both users and public interest topics without agency or notification, condemning by decision of a secret, unauditable council under influence of the federal government and corporations, and doing so under the tack of keeping their CEO in the dark shows how carefully calculated their appearance was. Remember, they lost their canary.
I don't think Elon Musk is much if any better. I also can't say that Twitter is any worse. Speech was being chilled and controlled before, and unless your definition of "free speech" is "being free from what offends me or is counter to my opinions and beliefs", it's more likely the hypocrisy you worry about is nothing more than actually being able to draw a line between an action and its cause and a target you can confidently level a finger at.
People will adjust as they ever have. However, the ones who interact now will be the influencers of what Twitter becomes. That is what matters, not any confused and petty logic that our leaders should all be infallible and godlike.
The rich and famous cannot have anonymity because you can't be rich and famous being anonymous. Of course the elite wants to have it both ways: report only what I want you to report.
How many rich and famous have been disgraced in the last 200 years because journalists posted outside their hotel room or followed their car?
It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.
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.
This man has done real damage to actual lives and communities in service of his ego, and he can’t even be forthright about his intentions. He can’t even stand by his own professed deeply held convictions, the entire reason he said this needed to be done, for more than 2 seconds before his own selfish ego takes precedence.
That doesn’t mean the plane tracking was or wasn’t good, it just surprised me that Calacanis was so unaware.
One wonders why someone let him do that in the first place if that’s his state of mind. He’s clearly not surrounded himself with competent people.
https://www.hueylong.com/programs/share-our-wealth.php
In the interests of full context, Huey Long was an authoritarian populist and the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith was a white supremacist by any meaning of those words. (Long wasn’t, but he was certainly happy to work with Smith.)
The crowd that got banned seems unusually thick-headed, and they'll probably just attack Elon (and Twitter itself) even harder once they get unbanned. Karl Popper explained it better than I can, but Twitter doesn't have to extend unlimited tolerance to those who seek to destroy Twitter.
Most doxxing that people worry about isn't just "oh look, biden is coming to town! cool!". It's more like "Supreme Court justice lives here with family. Go outside their house and start 'threatening' them now", followed by some sort of fake "no violence" post to CYA.
But two years ago, the rules were whatever Vijaya Gadde made up on the spot. Why is this suddenly a cause for outrage? Twitter has always been like this.
US company using Paypal to accept money from US persons? Paypal has presence in the EU and will hand your money over.
Credit card transactions also aren't protected from marketing tracking activities, neither are Twitter or Facebook ads, neither is what my isp can discover from my dns requests, cell phone providers can sell my location metadata, and the credit bureaus are ordinary businesses with huge data leaks.
This is public information, police can operate on it without a warrant, and whether we're driving, flying a private jet, walking in a town square, or purchasing a coffee, or browse the internet - other private entities can too.
LifeLock and identity theft protection are sold to everybody, tax forms allow anybody to try to use someone else's number - the government refuses to do anything, and companies have minimum privacy + security requirements.
For example in Finland you would likely be violating the radio secrecy laws by merely listening unless you're actively involved in aviation (e.g. flying a plane or sitting in a tower)
In all EU countries you would be violating the GDPR if you stored this data without a lawful basis. (If you're wondering what constitutes "lawful basis", here's a helpful tool https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/gdpr-resources/lawful-b...)
> I doubt the EU courts would argue any other way otherwise we'd need to criminalize tracking of UPS trucks and the like
Why would the GDPR prevent UPS from tracking their own trucks? How is this even remotely related to what we're discussing here?
It's almost never difficult to find out what private jets companies and celebrities own in any case, except when obfuscated behind multiple layers of shell companies and with strict opsec, neither of which Musk practiced.
Every aircraft is tracked and trackable this way, only Musk is turning it into a big deal using outrageous claims about safety. Get real.
The whole debate about the killing of JFK is less about Oswald or his motives and 100% focused on the failures to protect the President.
Musk is not special, he occupies the same 10 square feet as everybody, and he has the resources to enforce a physical perimeter of security way larger than that around himself and/or whoever he might be interested in.
People have the right to know where he is and what he is up to, that comes with his position, if he doesn't like it he can start offloading his billions to the less fortunate.
Musk failed to protect his family (btw what family?) in the physical world and now wants to have his vengence in the online world. Doesn't work that way, he should start spending on security like any other billionaire to ensure safety for himself and people he cares about in the physical world and leave the online world alone, including the ability to track him (and dare I say it?) make fun of him.
But it will never happen because this guy doesn't care about common sense, he only cares about being a Techno-God among mortals , in a world where rules don't apply to him and everybody genuflects to him.
Combine this with a general support of conservative fiscal policy as a wealthy business-owner and the libertarian ideals of a gen-X nerd who came of age during "information wants to be free" and obviously suffering from a compulsive social media addiction (pot calling kettle black here), and it's no surprise he's completely bought into "free speech conservatism", where slander and hatred are placed on even footing with legitimate political argument.
Somehow getting, storing, and sharing passenger manifests would constitute PII of the sort that falls under GDPR.
None of this represents tracking his or his family's real time location, because:
a) We can't tell which aircraft he is on from that data. b) He can use other aircraft, including charters. c) This only applies to while the aircraft is actually airborne or departing from or arriving at an airport, which is already easy to observe and record by spotters, and does not track him or his family anywhere else.
What about Satoshi? And funnily enough it was exactly Musk status circa 2017. A billionaire known only by people following the stock market and tech/auto sector specifically.
He made his own bed ever since the accusation of pedophilia against Vernon Unsworth who was participating in the Thai cave rescue.
The combined wealth of Brin and Page also would land them at #1 in the Forbes list but nobody knows them. So it's possible to a degree, it was never possible for Musk however because he has a deep need to be a primadonna
It sure as hell does, just like it applies to movements of cars and movements of mobile phones.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
https://www.privacy-ticker.com/decision-to-fine-the-norwegia...
> Please provide some evidence of your repeated claim that they're illegal in Europe
What kind of evidence do you want exactly? This is crystal clear to anyone with the most basic understanding of the GDPR.
Elon is harshing the vibes of Twitter addicts.
It's no more sophisticated than that. I used to think it was. But look at conversations about Musk following the twitter purchase, compared to conversations about Musk regarding Tesla. I've come to see that it's just people and their personal relationship to their toys.
I don't give two cares about Tesla and have like 5 Tweets in 14 years. Conversations about either never really made sense to me when looking from the perspective of someone emotionally uninvested and just watching things come and go in the world. But look at tech as toy and it all makes sense.
90% of comment when Twitter was censoring before Musk were in support of it.
Now 90% of comments in this thread are against it.
Is it just fine and not DOXing to track and publish the location of people who don't move around all the time, after a 24 hour time lag?
Sounds like this 24 hour rule is specifically designed to protect Musk himself, and only incidentally anyone else who happens to own a private plane.
The comment I responded to specifically was upset about censorship targeted at tweeting Mastodon links and not another version of censorship which came in the exact same form but targeted X links. I just gave X a name.
I find it somewhat absurd that a person would become indignant when the link is Y instead of X.
It's bad faith through and through.
You know HN has hundreds of thousands of users, right?
No, I 'literally cannot even.' I cannot see how a platform might want to suppress anything except, perhaps, gore videos and child pornography. And that includes links to Mastodon and the ElonJet account, but I don't feel like I should have to put this disclaimer up just so people will stop telling me that I wanted to look at Hunter Biden's penis.
Sure, I can follow the proposed line of reasoning, but it is evident that instead of swaying the election because of fake news, they may have swayed the election because of not fake news. They were aware of this possibility, and yet the soldiered on censoring that story, so I'm not convinced that their actual reasoning was that they honestly did not want to sway the election.
A car is generally registered to an individual. A plane isn't.
You could also -maybe- argue that because there's multiple people on the plane (assuming Ol' Muskie isn't flying it himself) and that those people are potentially different every time, without a passenger and crew manifest, it's not identifying individuals (but I suspect you'd not get far with this.)
GM is down 41% YTD. Stocks are funny that way.
I think you got the wrong takeaway from that.
It wasn't fake news and deep down all the downvoters know it.
Suppressing it when it was known to be true was also a story.
>Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.
Actually they were at the forefront of spreading fake news as three actual journalists disclosed. Did you not even read the coverage? Because it sounds like you didn't. I even provided links to all of it above.
Let me know after reading it if your views have changed.
But still, a bureaucratic committee that produces relatively stable results instills a lot more trust than a single forum addict who then buys the forum so he can ban anyone who argues with him.
We, which very much includes myself, had come to take bureaucracies for granted. We focused on their failures, got frustrated at their stifling nature, and concluded the whole concept was worth raging against. But the resulting rise of individual-autocratic personalities has shown the value that bureaucracy had been bringing - slow moving predictability. All hail our Beige overlords?
Having said that, on the larger topic, I've been waiting for "web 2.0" to be revealed as the authoritarian dumpster fire it is since someone coined the term "AJAX". The obvious answer is decentralized systems that get the meddlesome third parties out of our personal interactions completely. And if this rampaging petty tyrant will help many more people to realize the intrinsic tyranny of centralized webapps, then I guess these events are a good thing?
From a GDPR perspective it also makes no difference whether it's 5% or 90% of planes that are owned by individuals as opposed to by companies.
And it's really obvious why, too: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg
Since HN is basically the nerds from tech, it makes perfect sense.
Are there any Oracle employees that can comment on the hivemind?
You can even see it before you read it. Comments like yours that are entirely reasonable, and trying to protect what HN is supposed to be in good faith are being faded out of existence because you corrected misinformation that they prefer over the truth.
People here keep omitting that part.
Do you have a citations for this? His son seems to disagree with your depiction of DePePe's political affiliation.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11537665/Son-Paul-P...
> responsible journalism
We haven't seen that in at least a decade.
edit: Specifically mentioning planes and their locations, I mean, not "extrapolating from cars to planes".
It isn't! These are ephemeral radio transmissions which contain PII. You might collect those transmissions and publish them somewhere, but that would be illegal.
> nobody has been able to successfully make a case that aircraft movements are cases of indirect PII in terms of the GDPR.
So you're just trolling. That's not how the GDPR works, you don't get to make any kind of case at all. The government will when they eventually get to it after clearing decades worth of backlogs.
And for what it's worth, there are already perfectly applicable precedents https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-851
I worry the American education system is failing us.
You have to be trolling. What leads you to believe that the GDPR which never mentions either aircraft or cars would treat these two kinds of vehicles differently?
Can you find anything in the GDPR texts to suggest that cars and planes would be treated differently?
Personal politics may have made them a little more skeptical of a story sourced from rudy guiliani than one from a sketchy source on the left - but honestly if you’re not deeply skeptical of stories sourced from rudy at this point, I’m sorry to say but you are biased away from truth.
If you want twitter / fb / etc to be dumb pipes you need them to operate outside of market forces. Either by being regulated by gov as a common carrier, privatized by someone with high minded ideals enough to resist banning anyone who criticizes him and doesn’t mind losing money on it, or by being run by some non-governmental foundation. Under capitalist motivations, you’re not going to get a dumb pipe.
So far none of those things are happening. Expect twitter to continue to be not a dumb pipe, not a zone of free speech, just biased in a different way under its new management - less about maximizing $$ and more about protecting its owners interests.
Total rubbish.
What right? And where is that right enumerated? I've read the federalist papers twice, the USC countless times, and know my way around the US Code. Nowhere is it defined that YOU have a fundamental right to keep track of people ...ostensibly because they are more successful than you?
Why can't we track losers, too? Make sure they are going to work or school and not just draining the retirement accounts of their parents?
You have no fundamental right to anyone's privacy. Full stop.
If I did that to you, you'd be pissed.
Same thing if I put a tracking device on your personal conveyance.
AF1 routinely turns off their ADSB transponder, as do military aircraft. They generally do not when operating in high traffic areas, but will if they are over commercial airspace and want to mask their position.
While this data's purpose is primarily for safety and to make ATC job easier, it was never intended to used as a public tracking system.
Doesn't work that way, poor people have no power by definition.
The separation of powers isn't just something between a handful of elites such as Congress members who can impeach and convict the POTUS, or a bunch of judges, generals, chiefs etc.
The ultimate separation of powers is that there are ultimately 8 billion of us keeping an eye on each other and preventing an individual from going rogue and engage in selfish and anti-social behavior, and that is true whether you are a journalist, President, judge, general, chief...whatever and also billionaires.
It's pretty much an accepted concept, by everybody, except from your guy , the guy you are defending so much who'd absolutely love to be the unchallenged and undisputed dictator of the online world, and tomorrow the physical world.
_This aircraft (xxx) is not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator._
Which proves my point.
A motivated stalker will dig in and research but that’s inevitable, but the other 99.999% losers will self-limit to whatever is available for the minimum effort.
This translates to harmless yelling at clouds, unless some cheeky troll does the homework for them.
ICO's guide to the UK GDPR does have a specific example of cars being identifiable[1] - "A vehicle’s registration number can be linked to other information held about the registration (eg by the DVLA) to indirectly identify the owner of that vehicle." Nothing about planes though.
[2] covers car registrations and explicitly discounts company owned vehicles from being PII - "The registration plates of commercial vehicles are not personal data of an individual as the vehicle is owned by an organisation."
All of Ol' Muskie's jets are owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a shell company.
[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
[2] https://sapphireconsulting.co.uk/is-a-car-registration-plate...
Car registration numbers is a very common kind of data for businesses to handle, of course it makes it on the list of examples.
Same is not true of planes, of course they don't make it on the list of examples.
>[2] covers car registrations and explicitly discounts company owned vehicles from being PII - "The registration plates of commercial vehicles are not personal data of an individual as the vehicle is owned by an organisation."
>All of Ol' Muskie's jets are owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a shell company.
This doesn't work, you can't wash off PII by tying one aspect of it to an organisation. My phone line might belong to a business, but that doesn't give the carrier a free pass to do whatever they want with associated location data.
What would it take to change your mind about this? There have already been close calls. Would someone actually have to harm Musk or his family? And you didn't address my ALPR analogy at all. Why does it matter whether the mode of transportation is a car or a plane?
1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944
2. https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1603857524574531584
Most news about Hunter Biden seems to be coming mostly from tabloids with a questionable relationship with the truth, and a political axe to grind. Even Fox News, a station known for its flexibility in what they call truth, passed on the story due to credibility concerns.
As far as I can tell, there's no convincing evidence that any of those questionable emails are authentic, and although a few of the emails do seem to be authentic, it's not clear that the hard disk itself is, and there's plenty of evidence that that hard disk has been messed with and has lots of content planted on it by others.
So everything about this smells like a dirty political hit job that even half of the Murdoch empire doesn't want anything to do with. And even if there is something here, it still pales in comparison to the corruption that Trump and his kids are still getting away with. Everything about this smells like a dirty political witch hunt based on made up or strongly manipulated "evidence".
> you're just trolling. That's not how the GDPR works, you don't get to make any kind of case at all. The government will when they eventually get to it after clearing decades worth of backlogs.
To “make a case” for something means to provide a persuasive argument for it. If I had meant pursuing a lawsuit I’d have said so.
What? Where am I defending Musk? You seem to have an unhealthy obsession with the clown. I haven't even mentioned the guy!
Unlike you, I don't give a shit about the guy. I'm just an European aircraft owner who's not a fan of these websites.
>There is no PII in these transmissions.
>To “make a case” for something means to provide a persuasive argument for it. If I had meant pursuing a lawsuit I’d have said so.
Are you kidding? Mere pictures of license plates associated with timestamps have been found to be covered by GDPR, perfectly analogous to what's being discussed here.
http://enforcementtracker.com/ETid-851
Instead of car license plates, we have tail numbers and ICAO addresses. That's the only difference.
Build a receiver with a Raspberry Pi
For under USD$100 / EUR€80, build a Raspberry Pi with a USB ADS-B receiver that can run dump1090 and PiAware. View data locally or via FlightAware Users that share data with FlightAware automatically qualify for a free upgrade to an Enterprise Account.
Regardless, < 1% is not a lot of Twitter users by pretty much any stretch. I think people in tech or fringe communities are seeing a high uptake in their own groups and assuming that to be reflective of Twitter users at large.
This is amusing because the ElonJet guy was actually a fanboy (originally, probably not anymore as he's being sued by Elon).
There's a number of ways one can avoid being tracked and Elon saying there aren't is a blatant lie.
No, I don't live in a country that censors the website - it's the company who owns the website that wants to do things with my data that my country (and myself) considers illegal.
It's a terrible job, but, at least, it has a great compensation package.
Elon made himself a public figure long ago.
We all know why these rules are being made, that Elon musk's feelings were hurt and he's lashing out, but Twitter is pretending that it's for some consistent rule. Transparency would be for twitter to say straight up that it's against the rules to say things Elon doesn't like
People are making fun of him because of that, and really dont care about about the censorships or bans
Entrepreneurs are self incentivised rather than being externally motivated by money, and if the chances of not being a billionaire we're to stop somebody from being an entrepreneur, we wouldn't have entrepreneurs already
Mind you, if we jumped back a couple hundred years and asked: "does banning slavery disincentive entrepreneurs from starting plantations?"
The answer would be irrelevant to whether slavery should be banned
Perhaps you've forever lived in an academic/industrial bubble, but a significant part of the population and definitely the vast majoirity of those that would engage in taking a virtual confrontation to IRL, are borderline illiterate, have significant difficulty parsing simple manuals. You're describing setting up a computer with Linux, configuring an SDR and configuring some software to parse the data stream.
To most people, that's lunar...
Really, it even has nothing to do with residency. It's all to do with jurisdiction, when Elon happens to be within EU jurisdiction he is protected by the GDPR.
When Elon takes his jet to visit Greece, he is indeed protected by the GDPR (even if just interacting with US based companies while he's on holiday, GDPR still applies)
Elon in fact has a lot to do with the apparatus of GDPR enforcement.
Except that they have never been treated equivalently in any legal venue or government regulation.
Nobody would even contemplate a public registry of car owners, for instance, but all of those countries maintain one for aircraft.
I’ve seen multiple attempts to make the same argument you are by disgruntled private aircraft owners every now and then. None have succeeded in any official venue.
If not, why would we just not accept that GDPR treats aircraft exactly how it treats everything else? The law, as written, clearly offers no specific coverage or exemption for any types of vehicles.
Are you joking? Lots of EU countries have had this, and still do.
For example in Finland, https://www.traficom.fi/en/services/vehicle-data-and-tax-pay...
In Sweden you can text the cars registration plate to 72503 and get the cars owners info.
In Norway you can look up car owners by registration plate or VIN https://www.vegvesen.no/en/dinside/kjoretoy/finn-eier-og-kjo...
In Portugal anyone can request the registration certificate from the IRN, that contains the owners information.
The governments aren't bound by GDPR and can totally do this, but as a private party it would generally be illegal for you to scrape this data.
>I’ve seen multiple attempts to make the same argument you are by disgruntled private aircraft owners every now and then. None have succeeded in any official venue.
Same is true of literally all GDPR violations, we've only just introduced these laws and catching up on the enforcement backlog will take decades.
Not only that, but most governments are doing a very shit job funding the enforcement authorities.
The obvious solution will be to allow impacted individuals to litigate GDPR violations by themselves.
You're the one arguing that there's some special exemption for aircraft, but have done nothing to substantiate that claim.
Besides, with the GDPR it works the opposite way. You have to justify why your data processing is legal, not the other way around.
And for fucks sake, neither of Flightradar24 or ADSBExchange even offer a GDPR-compliant privacy policy. ADSBexchange does not offer one at all.
There's also no context in that video, it's just a clip of a person in a car. I do not take Elon's word for anything, he's demonstrated over and over and over that he will act in bad faith. The one party he probably would/should not lie to, the police, doesn't seem to have any report from him about this event.
[1] https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1603454821700452365
[2] https://www.facebook.com/ElonJet/posts/pfbid02Ldh5x93kQe6E6E...
There is no government censorship imposed on the content - it's a company that's unwilling to comply with the law.
