this is a myth perpetrated by Elon to justify his banning of twitter account, there is nothing private about tail information, in fact it is required to be publicly available.
Genuine question, IANAL: how is this different from car registration plates, which Google blurs out to avoid this kind of problem for normal people? Ditto all the data protection issues about ANPR systems.
(This isn't to defended Musk, quite the contrary given he tweeted a number plate).
Many aircraft, particularly those flying IFR, are required by law in many jurisdictions to broadcast their location to reduce the risk of collisions and facilitate air traffic control. Check aviation transponder interrogation modes and ADS-B in particular
we track planes for safety reasons. when a plane disappear from the radar, it's a big deal. an educated guess why cars aren't tracked is privacy and there are too many.
but in a world where cars are going to be electric, these problems might go away.
Subreddits were banned for collecting publicly available on information in a single post. There used to be a subreddit documenting lives of Google CxOs, it didn't last one week.
I would have agreed and recently made the same argument on HN re the Twitter bans.
What I’ve since learned however is that tracking his jet requires a combination of public and private information. He’s part of a privacy scheme which routinely changes the plane’s identifier: https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/160385752457453...
At that point, I think the argument that it’s doxxing is justified to some extent.
> What I’ve since learned however is that tracking his jet requires a combination of public and private information. He’s part of a privacy scheme which routinely changes the plane’s identifier: https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/160385752457453...
My understanding is that he _stopped_ using this service and now his plane broadcasts the same tail number all the time.
This government program was specifically designed to hide the link between an aircraft identifier and the owner of the aircraft.
If the link between Elon Musk and the aircraft identifier he flies with was meant to be publicly available, why does this program exist in the first place?
Is it possible that this program is ineffectual, because of publicly-available information from other sources that can be cross-referenced?
If I were to put together a badly implemented privacy program that people can trivially circumvent without breaking the law, who should be blamed when people do exactly that?
Me, or the people doing the trivial yet legal circumvention?
>In most other cases that has been released illegitimately in the first place though
There is plenty of information in public records like people's addresses that are released legitimately. An address is enough information to SWAT someone.
This is not "hacking". This is information derived from publicly available information, presumably a quite trivial inference. If it is public information that x=2 and y=3, then x+y=5 isn't suddenly private information, just because it requires a trivial inference.
Photos taken on phones often contain GPS data. If someone publicly shares a photo they’ve taken and the data isn’t scrubbed, it’s trivial to find out where the photo was taken.
Just because it’s easy to uncover doesn’t mean it’s fine to go off and broadcast it. That’s doxxing.
Some have been for a couple months. In any case, figuring out which plane uses which PIA code might seem easy if the patterns are always the same, but that’s still not trivial enough not to be considered as a privacy breach. Everything here sounds a bit like the "yes the house was private but the door was open" robber excuse.
I wouldn't know. The person I replied to claimed that it was "private information of individuals". If it's public info by law then referring to it as private seems very misleading, wouldn't you say?
The aircraft tracking data itself is public, but what's not public is the information which links the temporary aircraft identifier to its owner when the owner is using that privacy program, which is the case for Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603803508087537665
That source is a reply by Musk confirming a statement by another person (https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1603748611896283137?s=20&...) commenting about Musk being enrolled in the PIA program. That statement also has a link back to the creator of the tracker themselves also admitting Musk's plane(s) are/were in PIA but they figured out how to track it/them anyway.
