Reply to Taylor Swift suing college kid tracking celebrity jets

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He also tracked Elon Musk for awhile. [/quote]

Who also sued him.[/quote]

Yep, and somehow the kid no longer tracks Musk pubilcly. The kid asked for $50,000 to stop putting Musk's plane tracking info on public sites (per the Washington Post today) though Musk supposedly didn't pay (sure, Elon, sure!).

The data is publicly available, yes, but you need to know how to interpret and massage it to get it down to "Taylor Swift's plane is going from X to Y at these times." Which is actual information a stalker can use. Part of her suit against the guy is that stalkers, plural, have turned up at her homes (also plural) at specific times her lawyers say were determined by tracking her travel through this one guy's accounts.

I don't think she'll win, and probably she shouldn't, legally, but I get the concerns involved. And the kid smells like a money-grubber. Who knows what other celebrities he's shaken down successfully, who pay him not to publicize their flights?[/quote]

I definitely get the privacy/security angle and can understand why she would be bothered. If someone were publishing information about when I left my house and where I went online, even if they were gathering the info from publicly available info, I'd also be annoyed.

BUT the problem is that even if she successfully sues this guy, it doesn't solve her problem. Because this guy might be annoying, but he's not a stalker. Like I truly do not believe he is trying to harm her or even track her specifically -- he does this with many celebs. But say she gets him to go away.

What is to stop an ACTUAL stalker with some internet savvy from doing the same thing, and unlike this guy, actually using the data to threaten her safety?

I think the smart play here is to allow this kid to do what he's doing, since he's publishing it online where you can keep an eye on it. Then what I'd do is manipulate it to disguise where I was actually going. As others noted, she lends her jet to people sometimes, you can't actually know for sure that she's on it or even that it's her jet. So I'd find some way to mask my actual travel in a way that uses this kid to my own ends. Make it look like I have certain patterns I don't have. Do weird stuff to throw it all off, like have my jet make regular cargo runs to a charity in a specific city that I'm not actually on, so people think I'm going to Minneapolis twice a month or something but I'm actually delivering diapers to a charity I founded there (and thus also reducing criticism about my carbon emissions).

I just think the smart play here is to use this kid to your advantage, not to silence him. Because I'd actually rather have him publishing this stuff for all to see than an actual stalker using the same public data in a private way to follow me around.[/quote]

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