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).
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?
So because a Twitter is single purpose its bad? If the twitter account followed two peoples private jets would that be enough? Or does it need to be a whole sale repost of the entire flight tracking feed? Can the person parse ANY flight data from this type of a Twitter account? Where do you draw your arbitrary line here?
This entire premise is so very weak to me. Elon is famous and a public figure and it's his own choice that people have as much interest in him as they do. He does everything he can to be in the public eye. There are tons of plane tracking accounts or applications. There is even one that tracks AF1 which carries one of the most powerful and important people in the world.
And this isn't a location tracker. This account doesn't follow Elon around and Tweet where he's headed once he lands, how long he might be staying, where he went for lunch, etc. And Elon can use completely legal methods to reduce how much of this information is publicly available.
> Just because you can publish information like this doesn't mean it's ethical
And just because some actions MIGHT have negative outcomes doesn't mean they are unethical.
Elon has all the tools to avoid being tracked by a random flight tracking service. If he doesn't use those tools then he doesn't care that much about his privacy. He posts images of him sleeping in the Twitter HQ, which has a publicly listed address. We aren't talking about some powerless individual who is having big companies abuse their privacy.
Twitter's policies define doxxing as the posting of private information that was not made publicly available by the owner. They also specifically allow "sharing information that is publicly available elsewhere, in a non-abusive manner".
ElonJet and all of the other similar bots tracking interesting aircraft are using information that is broadcast unencrypted by the aircraft itself to anyone within radio range (sometimes hundreds of miles) who has a compatible receiver (including the famous $15 RTL-SDR) and publicly shared through multiple aggregators like ADS-B Exchange, FlightAware, and FlightRadar24.
This data is legally required to be broadcast, so it's definitely not private, and it's definitely publicly available elsewhere.
Elon would probably argue that it was abusive, but that's a lot more subjective. As far as I'm aware the account never tweeted anything but the facts of his jet's movements.
As far as I’m aware, journalists were only referencing ElonJet, which, as OP established, is only re-publishing already public information.
Despite this, even if you want to somehow argue that it’s against the rules, I reject that claim as well. Twitter’s policies[1] explicitly allow “location information related to commercial property or places of business, where this information is publicly available,” and all of “Elon’s” jets are owned by commercial entities.
Edit: citations showing “his” jets are owned by an LLC:
Consider the following: The Twitter files contains a lot of private information and outs employees whom have received direct harassment.
The ElonJet account contains publicly available information on a very accessible site. This does not make a statement about Musk nor does it tell who is inside the jet at the time.
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.
Seems like those accounts violated a rule around doxxing. The account that tracked Elon's private jet in real time was banned and those accounts were linking to it on other platforms.
You can disagree with the rule on real time doxxing, or argue that it is irregularly enforced, but your comment seems to be a kind of misinformation where you omit the causal link.
This account didn't track a flight of a plane but Elon Musks movement. That purpose of registration numbers (and ADS-B) is helping air traffic control and general safety. Not surveillance of personal movement. The same accounts for license plates of cars.
If Twitter want to do something useful they should reconsider their own standards regarding privacy in general.
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 this whole "Twitter blocking Mastodon links for anticompetitive reasons" narrative is wrong to the point of being disingenuous.
People have been tweeting links ElonJet trackers on Mastodon instances (including the official @joinmastodon account!), getting both themselves and the target Mastodon instance domains flagged. This is edgelord behaviour.
Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information. Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information (https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/security/privacy/privac...). Those tracker accounts are using non-public information.
Jack Sweeney, the guy who runs ElonJet, is on record saying he'll stop tracking if paid money. This is extortion. That is why Elon is pursuing legal action against him.
The only criticism I believe one can make here is that Elon's personal involvement (albeit brought on by attacks on himself and his family) has meant Twitter's moderation team has made enforcement of this particular ToS violation a priority. I agree that the solution to Twitter's previous bias is not more bias, and I look forward to Elon & the Twitter team coming up with a better solution for this.
Unfortunately left-minded techies have uncritically jumped on this narrative of Elon cravenly blocking Mastodon links because 'he feels threatened by it'. Just because someone has been very successful does not mean it is legitimate to mistreat them.
‘Mr. Musk tweeted last month: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.” On Wednesday, though, he equated the practice to doxxing, or the publishing of private information online with malicious intent, tweet-ing: “Real-time posting of someone else’s location violates doxxing policy, but delayed posting of locations are ok.”’
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.
That is entirely baseless. I'm fairly certain that whole affair was just some social media assistant offering money to someone for Musk to have slightly increased privacy and PR(since private jet use is really bad for the environment). They offered like $5k to take itf down which to Musk is literally like giving a homeless person a couple quarters. All flight traffic is public though. Banning a Twitter account would do nothing as all that information is already public record. You can track whoever you want on sites like Flightradar. I really doubt Musk cares that much at all, if he was ever actually even aware that the Twitter account existed.
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…
Do you really agree that making the public location of Elon's plane more public and easily accessible is doxxing though? I get it if it was the real time location of Elon within 100 meters, or his personal house in a forum with the intention to do harm or something, but the location of a plane that narrows your location down to a city and requires government grade anti air missiles to realistically expect to take down while in flight? The increased security risk of the latter seems like a rounding error to me, which makes the justification for removal very suspect because the thing it does dramatically increase is the public knowledge of how much of a climate hypocrite the guy is flying as much as he does.
It's public information (ADB-S) and the account is exercising its freedom of speech. Elon said on twitter that "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk" (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456)
It's 100% illegal in Europe, there's a law explicitly saying you can't block competitor links etc. in social media.
It's also likely illegal in the US, but FCC will have to rule.
Twitter is doing a lot of illegal things right now. And lots of lawsuits are piling up. The problem is, this fact doesn't stop Elon from adding more to the pile.
> 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).
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