Wouldn’t a 24 hour delay be enough to satisfy the curious about Elon’s flying habits, without creating a possible security risk? I don’t know how real the risk is, but it is certainly not zero, as he is a controversial public figure.
ADS-B information is broadcast unencrypted in real time from every civilian aircraft all the time. Anyone can receive this information with easily available equipment and tell everyone about it on a website. I don’t think it’s technically possible to censor this information. If you’re worried about someone shooting you down or whatever then you’re going to have to find a different way to counter this. Maybe fit countermeasures or buy another two planes and keep people guessing which one you are on. But it seems overly paranoid TBH.
> ADS-B information is broadcast unencrypted in real time from every civilian aircraft all the time.
ADS-B information is available publicly, but what's not always available publicly is which aircraft (or rather, which aircraft identifier) belongs to whom.
Specifically, if an aircraft is subscribed to this program, then it receives a new temporary identifier every month, unconnected to the owner:
So I think the problem is not tracking some airplane, the problem is connecting an airplane identifier to its owner by other means and then publicly broadcasting that information (i.e. make it easily accessible), when its owner has requested the government for privacy protection under a government program which was specifically designed to provide that exact type of privacy protection.
Note the 'PIA' flag and lack of additional information that would normally be pulled from the registry. In fact if you searched the registry for A0FE01 you would not find the actual aircraft but a placeholder.
Musk uses three jets, N628TS, N272BG, and N502SX. None are in the PIA programme, all are easily visible on ADSB Exchange and most importantly have their ICAO hex codes listed publicly on the FAA registry, along with ownership information.
As was pointed out in responses to your independent post about this[1], aircraft enrolled in PIA still have public permanent codes, which they must use when outside the US, as Musk is now (at the World Cup in Qatar).
Linking to the adsbexchange page for that permanent code doesn't prove that no anonymous temporary PIA codes exist.
You should be more careful before accusing someone of lying.
You're right about international flights and I should have specified that, but you can view the aircraft's recent US-only flights and see that it also used its permanent ICAO code.
You're completely sidestepping the issue that the man is amongst the richest in the world, so the whereabouts of his private plane could be argued to be of public interest. Keep this in mind as well; his plane's whereabouts are being derived from obscured data and published. Not his own personal whereabouts. We don't know what car he takes and where he goes once he lands. What is he scared of? A scud missile?
For example, we know his plane is in Quatar. With the news he is trying to sell shares of Twitter at his purchased price, we now can investigate whether he is talking to Quataris about selling shares. Being amongst the richest and owning a social network puts you in the public eye.
> You're completely sidestepping the issue that the man is amongst the richest in the world, so the whereabouts of his private plane could be argued to be of public interest.
I'm guessing most participants in that privacy program are filthy rich and yet the program was still created.
You can argue that the whereabouts are in the public interest, but the real-time whereabouts are much harder to justify.
> Keep this in mind as well; his plane's whereabouts are being derived from obscured data and published. Not his own personal whereabouts. We don't know what car he takes and where he goes once he lands.
You'd do if you went to the airport before he lands.
> What is he scared of? A scud missile?
I'm guessing he's scared of someone hurting or kidnapping him or his family. You would be too if you were in his position, believe me.
No amount of hired security can completely mitigate the risk of your exact coordinates being broadcast in real-time, every single day.
It's amazing to me how much lack of empathy people have against other people, just because they're rich or famous. Or maybe it's just ignorance about the risks these people face every single day.
> For example, we know his plane is in Quatar. With the news he is trying to sell shares of Twitter at his purchased price, we now can investigate whether he is talking to Quataris about selling shares. Being amongst the richest and owning a social network puts you in the public eye.
You don't need his location in real-time for that.
> It's amazing to me how much lack of empathy people have against other people, just because they're rich or famous. Or maybe it's just ignorance about the risks these people face every single day.
I wouldn’t do any of this power hungry behavior while being a reason why society is so unfair. You’re defending a billionaire with empathy arguments while we have homeless people in the country and abroad.
I guarantee you if Elon gives me $1B I will never use security.
>It's amazing to me how much lack of empathy people have against other people, just because they're rich or famous. Or maybe it's just ignorance about the risks these people face every single day.
No one else gets to opt out of the same thing. FYI.
Just because you make more money than me doesn't mean you're entitled to an exception from the same risks everyone else takes.
And for that matter, considering that everyone else is also getting spied on real time coordinates-wise based on mobile phone, but no one seems to muster the will to care it weakens his case substantially with the additional ATC interest.
> Wouldn’t a 24 hour delay be enough to satisfy the curious about Elon’s flying habits, without creating a possible security risk? I don’t know how real the risk is, but it is certainly not zero, as he is a controversial public figure.
I agree with you, but I think the problem is that if you publish Elon's flying habits with a 24 hour delay, then you're effectively doxxing which airplane is Elon's jet, which would allow anyone to track Elon's jet in real-time for the next month, basically.
This could be somewhat avoided if Elon's jet received a temporary private aircraft identifier for every flight (instead of every month, which is how it works currently [1]).
But even then, if the airplane landed on a small airport (i.e. with few aircraft on the ground), it would still be possible to determine whether an airplane that is taking off is Elon's jet or not, based on the fact that Elon's jet landed there on the previous day and the destination for today's flight is [some place where Elon commonly flies to].
Could Musk successfully make the case that, despite this technically being public information, curating it in such a way to track him personally constitutes harassment?
I don't really see this flying in front of a court. This information is easily accessible publicly literally one search to get the aircraft registration number and a second one on Flightradar24 or any of the other sites/apps to see where it is. It's not "technically public" as onsite paper records at your mayor's office, it's widely accessible online public.
So if Elon's aircraft identifier was meant to be publicly accessible even though he is using that program, why does this privacy program exist in the first place?
Hmmm, at this rate we’re going to have to create Elon News ;)
I think it’s interesting to see somebody who thought content moderation was a simple problem realise that content moderation is actually an incredibly difficult and, in some ways, unsolvable problem. However it risks becoming a dominant conversation when there are plenty of other good conversations to have.
Whilst I've had a lot of fun arguing about him, Twitter etc, it is getting a bit stale now. Hopefully he quietens down a bit soon and we can move onto a big and important new topic like 2 spaces or tab!
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.
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