Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by andrewzah 1517 days ago
If this concerns you so deeply then write to your representatives to enact legislation. The kid did nothing wrong as it stands now since anyone can look up that data apparently.

I doubt private flying will become that frequent within the next 100 years. How would it possibly be safer than driving? Now instead of just dealing with distracted, sleepy, drunk drivers on the road, I have to worry about accidents raining down from the sky? Please, just build train systems and well designed, well-zoned, walkable cities and we won’t need to worry about flying.

1 comments

I actually do work on this!

I'm on the board of an organization (fightforthefuture.org) that has been leading on passing legislation for limiting the use of biometric surveillance, like face recognition. That's a small subfield of the larger problem of the privacy impacts of programatically analyzed public data, but people seem to understand it intuitively and that makes it a good place to start.

Also, I mentioned the flying cars example not to assert that there will be flying cars, but as a way to illustrate why this data should not be public: i.e. because it would be clearly bad to have this data public for a more popular vehicle type.

I should also say that it is definitely wrong for people with Musk's level of resources to sue people without those resources over something probably this minor.

I'm just chiming in to point out that we should not consider aggregated public data fair game just because it comes from public data, because some uses of this data (including this one, though again probably in a minor way, though I say "minor" knowing almost nothing about Elon Musk's personal threat model so maybe I'm wrong) can have a harmful impact on individuals and the public.