But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.
Are you going to track the locations of his vehicles and where they park next?
An alternative argument - if we're going to do it to him, maybe we should do the same to everyone (which is crazy because no one cares that much about random plane movements from rich guys unless they are politically connected, or green hypocrites, or involved in some crime, but Law Enforcement protects this data etc)
You could hide within this, say, you know, take a first class flight somewhere on a commercial plane. The price you pay for having your own plane is that your plane's movements are public.
I personally support all of this data being public, it's generally a great way to gain information on clandestine government activities.
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
I think there are legitimate questions about how and where aggregating crowdsourced data on people's movements crosses a line.
I am sure that allowing crowdsourced license plate reader data that makes a full history of every car movement public would be well across the line.
I am not so sure that this crosses that line but I think that discussion would be much more interesting than the low quality Musk bashing that seems to dominates these comments. (Edit: There are also some high quality comments that are quite critical of Musk that add information and context and deserve to be more prominent, but they are in the minority as the low quality comments are pretty prevalent and not being downvoted sufficiently.)
Given that the LADD list exists, we either need to repeal that law, make circumventing that law a crime, or make the the process for inclusion in the LADD list more rigorous and public.
The current situation where we are allowing companies to bypass privacy laws by using crowdsourced data seems like a bad precedent.
Yeah, people are saying "it's public info about a public figure", but I'm pretty sure that we could imagine all sorts of creepy-yet-legal digital gang-stalking that one can do, similar to how doxxing is legal but nearly-universally frowned upon. Not to say that the account should have been banned, but I don't see this as just harmless fun like others seem to.
In theory the various intelligence services and the FAA have this information, but it's not acted on.
It's interesting that you would put this at your limit because this is free and public data.
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean I need to know your private medical conditions
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean we need all potential targets of political assassination to have their schedules always publicly available with arrival and departure times with 10 digit grid coordinates
Just because I support free speech doesn't mean everyone should be able to track everyone else's cell phones, which are a proxy for a person's physical location
You might as well say 'everyone'. Anyone rich enough to use, let alone own, a private jet is almost by default politically connected.
Problem here is that there are clearly free speech bounds, but Elon Musk has campaigned publically about being a "free speech absolutist" which would entail not curbing any form of speech.
You can always find compelling arguments for banning speech or forms of speech and we'll continue to draw and redraw lines as a society. But you can't go around claiming to have some absolute principle and then renege on it any time it hurts your feelings and continue to be respected. Can you think of anyone else who has their flights tracked? Are Bill Gates' flights tracked? Why do you think that is?
Also being a public figure means that you lose some amount of privacy. If he doesn't want all this drama he could just stop talking and being a highly prominent public figure. Now we're just going to get a flight tracking website instead, probably with new features.
I think there are at least two problems with your alternative argument, if not more. The first problem is Elon Musk is politically connected and operates in the public sphere as a highly political person. The second problem is that there isn't anything that prevents people from tracking other rich people like they do Elon, except that nobody cares about what they do because they don't do things like buy Twitter. If you want a change I think you have to make private flight information unavailable, but until then I don't see any real problem with it. Stop flying a private jet if you don't like people posting where you are flying to and from. There isn't anything that prevents someone from reporting everywhere I go except that nobody cares. Hell, I self-report it on Yelp.
