Just to play Devil's Advocate, the account is only tracking the movement of Elon's jet, not Elon himself. I don't know if you can consider that 'stalking' when, different to a private car, the movement of private planes is still somewhat public information.
I know this. If I were to track movements of a car around a city and call the account KarensCar and try and extort her in exchange for shutting down the account it wouldn't be any different than what this guy is doing to Musk.
Flights are public information. Cars are not. Are you seriously such a fanboy of Elon that you have to pretend to be offended by someone sharing public information that anyone can google and get in 3 clicks? If the 1% doesn't want their private flight info to be shared, then they can just take a normal flight like the rest of us.
Flights are clearly not public information. I cannot look up where you've been flying on regular airlines recently and that's how it works for virtually everyone.
Reality is, governments and the airline industry could make this system be sufficiently private if they wanted, or at least a lot harder to abuse. There's no particular reason personal details of jet owners have to be linked to the radio transponders.
No, I'm not a fan boy. I just think it's ridiculous that people are ok with this. I know it's very easy to look up flight data. But looking up flight data and making a Twitter account dedicated to a private plane's movement and then trying to extort the owner is different.
No-one is defending the owner of the account asking for more money in response to Elon asking them to take it down and offering some compensation. However, they didn't take the initiative to approach Elon first and ask for money for removal of the account, and their responses to Elon can be read as just (immature) bravado. So your accusation of 'extortion' looks to me as overhyped as your accusation of 'stalking'.
This sort of repression of free speech is a very slippery slope. It starts with publicly stating the location of Elon's private jet becoming a crime, and ends with a dictator in control of the world's most powerful armed forces.
> The owner of the account is a stalker attempting to extort his victim.
Extortion is a criminal offense and stalking can also be one, depending on its severity. So that means you're the one who brought crime into the discussion (with wrongful accusations, in my view).
And I just pointed out to you that the movement of private planes is already far more public than the movement of private cars, and for good reasons. The account isn't (as far as I know, I've never looked at it) actually doing their own tracking; they are simply (I assume) collating public information from air traffic control authorities, etc.
Aircraft transponders, which are legally required to broadcast on public frequencies, aren't remotely similar to whatever cell based surveillance trickery you're thinking of.
Or if someone personally canceled the Tesla order of a Tesla critic which he has done at least once. For all his talk about free speech without limits he doesn't really practice it.
> “I go like, Oh my gosh, Elon Musk just DM’d me: ‘Can you take this down? It’s a security risk,’” Mr. Sweeney said. “Then he offered me $5,000 to take it down and help him make it slightly harder for ‘crazy people to track me.’”
[...]
> Mr. Sweeney made a counteroffer to Mr. Musk, according to the screenshots of the exchange, saying that he would abandon the account if Mr. Musk upped the ante to $50,000. He said that he would also accept a Tesla Model 3, an electric car that costs more than $38,000, adding that he was joking.
If the location of Karen’s car is publicly tracked and available, then it’s exactly like the Elon Musk plane situation.
However, Karen’s car is not required to have a transponder, so the location of it isn’t public information. Therefore, it’s actually nothing like the Elon Musk plane situation. Hope this helps!
Karen's car drives and parks on public streets. It has an identification number posted on it. The information is out there for everyone to see. It's not as easy to automate as a transponder, but it's not necessarily private.
