Two years ago, I described the saga about the college kid who put up twitter feeds that track private jets, thus revealing their movements (link). I said: "The right not to be tracked is poised to become a civil rights issue."
This prediction is one more step closer to becoming true, based on Business Insider's update on this saga. Apparently, hidden inside the FAA reauthorization bill is a provision that lets private jet owners obscure their tracks.
Who owns private jets? Not the average citizen.
By default, citizens will be afforded zero privacy, while the super-rich and well-connected will buy privacy from the politicians. That's where we're heading.
Jack Sweeney's jet tracking stunt is a precision-guided bomb, targeted at the private-jet class. It exposes the hypocrisy of tech leaders.
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But such laws can't stop engineers from getting what they want.
Famously, Elon Musk banned Jack Sweeney's twitter feeds but he just moved his feeds to a twitter competitor.
Jack already has a response to the new law. "We can still figure out who's who via context clues."
These tech CEOs will discover that they couldn't escape the data-hungry, privacy-busting tech infrastructure they brought to our world. What are these context clues? Their homes, for example, are not easily disguised. The make and model of airplanes. etc. It may take more work but the determined engineer can figure it out.
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When Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google, he infamously said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." (link)
The same Eric Schmidt some years later got into the military drone business, and he sang a different tune: "You're having a dispute with your neighbour. How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?" He was calling for a ban on civilian drones (link).
As far as I know, he has not retracted his earlier statement.
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