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.
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! :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see how it could be, that seems like an entirely separate issue.
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.
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.
Somehow getting, storing, and sharing passenger manifests would constitute PII of the sort that falls under GDPR.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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?
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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)
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.