[bburrito]

You do realize you can buy a $100 antenna on Ebay and pull the live-to-the-second location of every airplane in your visible sky, directly from the aircraft, right?

There are websites displaying this exact same data where you can watch US Military Air Tankers in active refuelling operations with both US and other nation's aircraft in active war zones.

The security risk is entirely overblown.

[PM_me_your_math]

The tracking account used an API to track his family's movements. It didn't use an antenna per se.

If I did that to you, you'd be pissed.

[rbanffy]

If I own a plane and you track that plane, there's nothing I can do, since that information is public. Websites that publish that data through an API are publishing data they got from the aircraft itself.

There's a number of ways one can avoid being tracked and Elon saying there aren't is a blatant lie.

[eecc]

Well, it won’t stop a dedicated stalker but having to plan an execute is already a significant barrier of entry for 99% of the bored, drunk, unstable minds that would come up with the idea of walking up to someone.

[jjav]

> it won’t stop a dedicated stalker

A "stalker" is pretty much by definition "dedicated". Otherwise it'd just be a casual observer.

But what it most important to keep remembering is that the whole discussion of elonjet account is a distraction. Sure, it's one guy posting the data for whatever motivation he has. But it doesn't matter at all, because the source raw data is public domain information available to the whole world for free on many other air traffic websites. Even if Elon were to shut off, somehow, every website in the world, the data is literally there for the taking out of the airwaves since it is being transmitted in the clear, by government mandate.

There isn't any conceivably rational argument to claim this data is private.

[Thuggery]

Are people on HN of all places pretending to be cutely ignorant about doxxing? Back in the days of Internet forums it was understood to be a bad thing to publish someone's home adress or a picture of it. It's not that home locations were thought secret information, it's an invitation to random crazies.

[dekhn]

we're not ignorant, we're taking many things into context. Musk is a public figure, he's being hypocritical, he's not actually being "doxxed", and his kid wasn't threatened by somebody who used the plane's location.