Really, what planet do these people live in? Musk has sued people he disagrees with, has sued whistleblowers, has sued a kid for making a twitter bot. They expect him to be some kind of free speech paragon? Fuck me...
Any source on this or is it just made up? I see news articles about him casually dming the @elonjet account run by a teen and offering him $5k to take it down. I guess that could be construed as a threat, except nothing else happened and the acc is still up
Kid or not, it's doxxing. Musk could have sued him outright but instead he asked him nicely to take it down and offered a good amount of money too. Kid's own fault he didn't take it.
The information shared was perfectly public, in this case there is no such thing as doxxing.
What you're also missing is that US legal system can bankrupt you financially and mentally if you're poor enough. Musk is clearly in the wrong there, there is no even gray area.
People shouldn't be doxxing anyone if they don't want to be financially and mentally ruined, that's very simple.
Doxxing is typically done from public sources, only very unusually it's some kind of uncovered private information (e.g. by hacking). Most of doxxing is piercing together public information and spreading it among the masses.
I don't understand and agree at all. If information is from public sources, why should spreading it ruin someone financially or mentally? If it's not illegal, what kind of repercussions are acceptable here?
It should be illegal and I really don't think it's legal, but that's up to a judge - that there isn't a specific law that says "exactly this is a crime" doesn't mean there isn't a more general law that applies.
For example where I live there is a general law about harassment and it's broad enough to cover this case, to have that Twitter account closed, and to have the person tried at criminal court and at the very least fined and put under supervision, if not imprisoned - if it happened inside this jurisdiction, of course.
It doesn't matter at all if it's from public sources or not. A lot of things are in the public now - because of careless data handling, due to leaks and hacks, and a lot of information is easily retrievable with social engineering. Making a special Twitter account that automatically announces every move that a person does with their vehicle is really way out of the norm.
Our society should not accept this, not even if the target is a rich person. How do you expect people are going to behave to poor people if this is how they're allowed to treat rich people?
We're not talking legal, if we're talking legal he can do whatever he wants with twitter, can't he. What I'm saying is that this clearly establishes that he doesn't give two shits about "free speech" or whatever, as long as he or his business concerns are on the receiving end.
I don't think even Musk thinks doxxing falls under free speech. That would be like saying "I never committed fraud, it was free speech" when stealing from someone online. Bullshit, not a single free speech absolutist thinks that's how it should work, I don't see why Musk should.
It is doxxing the same way tweeting "Little Billy is going to his school now" every time he does so is. Doesn't matter you saw Little Billy from your window.
No, it is not. It is public information. The only thing kid did is tweet information that can be accessed by all persons in the US. Do you mind not being stubborn on things you don't know about?
Let's say that in the near future there exists a Google Maps API that gives real-time satellite imagery of the entire planet. We seem to be headed in this direction.
Is a Twitter account that uses this API to post all movements of a single private individual, or their vehicle really so unobjectionable, just because it comes from a public API?
At some point we will need either very strong social norms, or case law, or most likely legislation to address this issue.
Addressing the privacy impacts of programmatic operations on public data (i.e. what you can see from a window, or a satellite) is an important frontier for privacy and a largely unsettled question. You're just seeing it play out in this case because data for this particular vehicle type is public.
(Which, I should add, is surely just for legacy reasons and definitely a terrible idea. There's no public interest in being able to track everyone with a plane any more than there is a public interest in being able to see comparable data for anyone with a bicycle, car, or cellphone. Or look at it this way: when private flight become 100x cheaper and safer to the point where we fly instead of drive, do we want our movements tracked just because we were in the air? Of course not.)
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.
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.
Yeah, nah. First, that information isn't posted publicly and accessible via a public API. Second, it's tracking a plane from one airport to another. Not Elon from door to door.
Air travel is a tightly regulated business and all flights are registered with and regulated by the FAA, which requires certain information about all flights to be publicly exposed. Thus, a function of air travel is that publicly available information is governmentally mandated to exist. The usage of this publicly available information is clearly enshrined.
The day to day of a child on the other hand is something that should not have information published publicly about, and entities who were to collect and share this information may be violating the law. I will not comment too much on the legality, but the ethics of such an action as described are also extremely questionable.
The information from ADS-B transmitters is public only by design accident (there's no good way to do it otherwise), not because it has to be public. Nowhere it's mandated that the information it shares should be public.
And before the internet, it was not public at all!
Doxxing is not generally illegal, though the way wealth plays into the legal system makes it impractical for a non-rich defendant to assert that against Musk.
You can't be for vigorous suppression publication of factual information about yourself that you dislike being known and radically pro-free-speech. They are opposed views on right and wrong.
Or maybe you're misinformed about his free speech claims.
He clearly stated that free speech applied to Twitter means that in the case of a grey zone, it's preferential not to censor. Which is not the same as an absolute take on free speech. People are running with a claim that was never made.
As for doxxing, I find it disturbing how a technicality is used to defend information that is clearly threatening. Recently, in the Netherlands extremists have been digging up the addresses of some politicians they dislike and publishing them on Twitter. It destroys their lives and basic sense of safety.
Technically, the addresses were public. Do you really see that as a sane justification to collect said data, actively publish it to an extreme audience with the very obvious intent of intimidation, and directly increase the odds of just one nutjob to do untold damage? It's fine because the data was "public"?
