Recently, Musk found himself battling a Twitter account that tracked his flight @ElonJet. A 19-year-old fan used self-developed aircraft tracking technology to monitor Musk's flights, which was widely publicized on Twitter, causing nearly 140,000 people to watch.
He took off from Austin, Texas, on January 23 and landed on Lanai, Hawaii, 7 hours and 4 minutes later;
On 25 January, he flew from Lanai to Kahului Airport, which took 14 minutes;
It then took off from Kahului Airport and landed in Austin, Texas after 6 hours and 21 minutes.
……
Musk bid $5,000 to get the account creator Sweeney to shut down the account that tracked his private jet. But Sweeney refused, because the price was too low to replace the satisfaction of running the account.
Sweeney is said to have asked Musk to raise the offer. "Is it possible to raise it to $50,000?" Sweeney asked in a Twitter DM with Musk. "It's going to be a huge support for my college life and maybe get me a car, maybe even a Model 3."
So far, the two have not been able to reach a deal, so ElonJet is still active.
The robot's recent posting history suggests that Musk returned to Austin, Texas, after a short vacation in Hawaii, but of course, the data the Twitter bot shared only shows information about the location of the plane, not who was riding it.
It's clear that Musk probably doesn't want something like his flight data to be easily accessible to the public.
As he said in his memo with Sweeney, "I don't like the idea of being stalked by a lunatic".
But in fact, the data published by Sweeney's Twitter bot is itself from publicly available sources and is not entirely private.
Tracking Musk while he's in the air isn't as easy as querying FAA data, because any information that can specifically identify Musk's flight is confidential. Sweeney's bot relies heavily on information from the ADS-B Exchange (data from most aircraft with ADS-B transponders), as well as anonymized FAA flight plans and airport data to determine which flights belong to Musk. That means Sweeney's robots need to do some computational work, which cross-references the data to calculate Musk's travel time, but they use publicly available information. While some technology may be required to identify certain aircraft, it seems that anyone willing to do some investigation can find out the details of celebrity flights, even if these celebrities have asked the FAA to restrict public access to flight data.
Sweeney has argued in the past, saying in a series of tweets published on Jan. 18 that his "account has every right to publish the whereabouts of the plane." Those who want to defend true private flight should raise it with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and tell them to "make a more privacy-conscious ADS-B system."
He added that his code is open source, and that it has already been stated that if his bot account is taken offline, someone will always recreate more tracking bots.
But then Musk didn't have any reply. Until last week, Musk's Twitter directly blocked Sweeney and its related accounts.
Sweeney also found that Musk also tried to use a "blocker" to prevent him from being tracked again, but this was of little use, ElonJet released the information of Musk's flight from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, as usual, and said that cracking was not difficult, but just took more time.
Subsequently, Scott Painter, CEO of British software company Autonomy, said he was willing to offer Sweeney a car for free for 3 years, provided Sweeney deleted its Twitter account. "He's got a lot of attention, but he's in a more awkward situation at the moment and we're willing to offer him a solution that looks good."
In the end, Sweeney still rejected the offer, "I'm not going to give up what I like for something I don't exactly want." I want my own car, and I don't want to give it back to anyone in three years."
Thanks to the storm, Sweeney has received a number of job offers, and he is now working at UberJets to help build a platform to track charter flights and allow customers to find cheaper seats.
Sweeney said that he gained a lot from these accounts, such as fans, such as programming knowledge, such as work, but more importantly, his behavior got the attention of his idols, and some interesting conversations took place.
"Chasing stars" to chase into this way, can also be regarded as a winner in life.