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Twitter's rules and policies now forbid live location information sharing
- a_shovel 4y agoThe phrase of the day is "ex post facto".
- snickerbockers 4y agoSo i guess it's considered fair to institute a new rule and then immediately ban everybody who violates that rule without giving them any advance notice or grace period to begin complying with the new rules?
- bombcar 4y agoIt may not be “fair” but that’s how it always works. If the person in power wants you gone, you’re gone unless you have someone more powerful in your side.
- reb 4y agoI'm pretty cynical, but let's be real: power doesn't have to work this way, and I don't think we do ourselves any favors acting like it does. A functional society finds ways to hold unchecked power accountable for pettiness, and that's a norm that doesn't go away unless all of us let it.
- kibwen 4y agoTo be more specific, societies are always threatened by actors who wield massive unilaterally-exercised power, who are only countered when enough other people band together and pool their own power in opposition.
- pessimizer 4y ago> power doesn't have to work this way Yes, it does. Power is what you can do. > A functional society finds ways to hold unchecked power accountable for pettiness This doesn't make sense. Unchecked power is not accountable.
- bombcar 4y agoMore importantly if there’s a power that can check it, then that power is the unchecked one.
- reb 4y agoWhy is that more important?
- bombcar 4y agoBecause if the problem is unchecked power, and any checked power is checked by a power that is checked or unchecked, eventually you either get a loop or an unchecked power, which can then do whatever abuse you're worried about.
- reb 4y agoHow do you figure? “Unchecked” means uncontrolled, not uncontrollable (an important distinction). In a functional social system, different powers constrain one another, which is a kind of loop I guess, but a stabilizing one.
- SilverBirch 4y agoJust to nit pick, they banned the people prior to actually announcing the rule.
- nickthegreek 4y agoMusk went from self appointed free speech supporter to precog cop real fast.
- labster 4y agoElon loves free speech that he agrees with. The dude is obviously within his rights to ban anything he wants on his private property, but it can’t be the world’s public square if he does so.
- 1attice 4y agoI propose that live information sharing be permitted for $8/mo
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- erlich 4y agoOwner of Twitter makes changes to policy that everyone kind of agrees with but they are still angry at him for doing it.
- Ztynovovk 4y ago“Everyone kind of agrees with” That’s a broad claim yeah? Data to support that claim?
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoWould you be okay with Elon Musk publicly posting the real-time location of your favorite politicians, or journalists who are critical of him, or other tech executives he has a beef with? I've yet to meet anyone who says yes, and I really don't think it'd even be a question if not for Musk's hypocrisy on the issue. I'm not sure how I'd go about finding "data" for this - it's one of those things that's so niche and so widely understood to be bad behavior, nobody bothers to write opinion polls about it.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIf they're public figures, sure.
- falcolas 4y agoPublic figures have always had fewer privacy rights than regular citizens. See paparazzi. You can also often find out where politicians and journalists by calling their offices. It's not private data. So, yes. I would be OK with it. So long as, like with the flight tracker bots, it's not included with an incitement to violence.
- pessimizer 4y ago> On March 14, 2006, Gawker launched Gawker Stalker Maps, a mashup of the site's Gawker Stalker feature and Google Maps. After this, Gawker Stalker—originally a weekly roundup of celebrity sightings in New York City submitted by Gawker readers—was frequently updated, and the sightings are displayed on a map. The feature sparked criticism from celebrities and publicists for encouraging stalking. Actor and director George Clooney's representative Stan Rosenfeld described Gawker Stalker as "a dangerous thing". Jessica Coen said that the map is harmless, that Gawker readers are "for the most part, a very educated, well-meaning bunch", and that "if there is someone really intending to do a celebrity harm, there are much better ways to go about doing that than looking at the Gawker Stalker". > On April 6, 2007, Emily Gould appeared on an edition of Larry King Live hosted by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel during a panel discussion titled "Paparazzi: Do They Go Too Far?" and was asked about the Gawker Stalker. Kimmel accused the site of potentially assisting real stalkers, adding that Gould and her website could ultimately be responsible for someone's death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker#Gawker_Stalker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker#Gawker_Stalker
- greggarious 4y agoHow are we going to define "live"? If the data is five seconds old? Five minutes? Five hours? How far between measurements can we share? Does this policy apply to everyone, or just nonpublic figures? Can someone provide a citation that doesn't require me to enable Javascript to answer these questions, if they are addressed in the policy? I spent good money on a Bellingcat workshop and now some of those skills are apparently useless, though to be fair the example we used in class was Jeffrey Epstein's plane, not Elon's IIRC. (I browse HN via Tor with JS off for "opsec")
- anigbrowl 4y agoHey, check this out - it seems we have always been at war with Eastasia!
- DiNovi 4y agoi have to wonder if you staid on at twitter because you believed in free speech what you make of being forced to quickly engineer a policy of censorship like this.
- _hello_hn_ 4y agoUnviewable for me. Can someone post content/screenshot here? Is it a recent change or something a few years old?
- badwolf 4y agoUpdated today: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-information https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info... What's changed: added several references to banning people's location, linking to sites that can show a flight path, or show where a person is. We define “live” as real-time and/or same-day information where there is potential that the individual could still be at the named location.
- _hello_hn_ 4y agoAside from them being explicit about flights, does this mean that those Jet accounts were breaking TOS guidelines for some time now?
- badwolf 4y agoThey're breaking ToS as of today, when this was updated.
- _hello_hn_ 4y agoThank you for clarifying. Not seeing the original makes it hard to gauge what was actually updated!
- falcolas 4y agoWell, they were breaking the ToS before the ToS was updated. So, futurecrime?
- nickthegreek 4y agoThey have been prejudged and sentenced accordingly.
- tedunangst 4y agoNote that this policy also bans posting "Elon Musk just got booed at the comedy club." Nice broad policy for selective enforcement.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoThis has the nice "benefit" of also making Twitter useless as a real-time organizing tool ("We're at City Hall demonstrating against the new ordinance. Come on down.").
- version_five 4y agoThat's not what the policy says, it's about sharing someone else's location without their permission or when they don't want you to Edit: I can see a grey area for "{$speaker,$performer} now taking the stage at {$conference,$music_festival}". Particularly if its somehow a surprise Edit 2: Imo as written it's not a good policy because there are probably going to be lots of harmless things in technical violation that get ignored, so it turns into a "we'll enforce it if we don't like you or what you're saying" rule
- saghm 4y ago> That's not what the policy says, it's about sharing someone else's location without their permission or when they don't want you to "I'm at City Hall demonstrating. There may or may not be other people because if there were, I haven't asked them if I can share their location or not. Come down and find out in person!"
- version_five 4y agoOk, you're too clever for me
- f38zf5vdt 4y agoIronically, if Elon had simply put "no one is allowed to track the private jets of my friends and I on my platform" into the rules and policies it would be a lot more straightforward. I'm not sure there's a word or phrase in English for "making something worse while trying to save embarrassment", but Elon is defining it.
- kibwen 4y agoPerhaps we should call it the Musk corollary to the Streisand effect.
- rvz 4y agoJust as before [0], a 'private platform' doing 'private platform things'. As expected; by a private platform. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057207
- imtyler 4y agoAnd we're discussing it because it affects us (the public,) what's your point?
- anigbrowl 4y agoDon't be disingenuous; the incongruity is over the previously stated commitment to maximally free speech. Twitter by Musk (tm) absolutely has the right to throw people off, set narrow content policies, and so on, just as was true under previous management. But equally, others have the right to point at the hypocrisy and say 'ha ha', because Musk swore up and down that he was gonna Be Different (tm).
- Avshalom 4y agohttps://mobile.twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1603151698570186757 https://mobile.twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1603151698570... They also seem to be banning photos of other people, unless they (Twitter) feel like it?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 4y agoUmm, between this and the provision cited in the first reply (from OSINTTechnical) this basically seems to require prior approval for any kind of live news coverage
- excerionsforte 4y agoSo if I'm a conference and I share video of public/private individuals while at that conference that would violate the rules just because they are at the conference. How would I know anyone's getting stalked? Sounds like a great policy alright O_o.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoNot Elon's jet, so you're good.
- nvader 4y agoOther commentators are pointing out the potential for future abuse from this policy. I'm interested in how this is targeted against @elonjet, the account dedicated to posting public information available about Elon's flights. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonjet https://mobile.twitter.com/elonjet
- tempsy 4y agoI mean...yes it's quite obvious the whole point of this update was to "allow" Elon to ban that account.
- chki 4y agoActually it was the other way around. The Sun King himself typed the three magic letters after banning the account https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603160241352462336 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603160241352462336 which probably led someone scrambling to update the policy.
- dragonwriter 4y agoHonestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Russia-Ukraine war OSINT was the main target and @ElonJet just visibly banned before updating the policy as misdirection because personal thin-skinnedness is less newsworthy a motivation. But, either way, its not good.
- janalsncm 4y agoStill doesn’t make sense to me. Twitter doesn’t need permission to ban any account. They can just do it. Creating an ad hoc rule about location sharing isn’t going to satisfy the free speech absolutism crowd. So what’s the point?
- excerionsforte 4y agoThere new policy in there specifically for that case, so it looks targeted. > If your account is dedicated to sharing someone’s live location, your account will be automatically suspended.
- jackweirdy 4y agoNaturally, I am not a lawyer, I am a dog on the internet. But some things have the smell of having been critically analysed by lawyers, and this just... doesn't somehow. It seems if I post a photo of a sports event that makes the stadium location obvious, that would now fall foul of this policy? Likewise a concert, or a politician at a publicly recognisable residence Purely personally, one of my most memorable times on twitter was the tens of thousands of people watching a British politician fly home on a long haul flight to get fired - quite sad that we won't get to experience the sheer bizarre feeling of that again https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/more-than-20-000-people-track-priti-patel-s-flight-back-to-london-as-she-faces-cabinet-axe-a3685576.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/more-than-20-000-pe...
- nickthegreek 4y agoIt’s almost like this whole rule was made up after the fact with little to no effort put into how it would be enforced when the sun rises the next day… But I think that’s just the new reality. Moving forward, Twitter is whatever Elon says it is whenever he says it is.
- ratg13 4y ago“Apply heavy visibility filtering” “Shit, someone decided to fully suspend the account and everyone noticed.. people are upset too” “Let’s unban him really quick while we figure this out” Only a couple of hours pass and they re-ban the account and suddenly have a new policy. This is basically the plot of the Ukraine invasion. Pivot, move, take plan C that was made up hastily, and always pretend like it was your goal.
- nradov 4y agoThe new reality is the same as the old reality. Twitter executives have been arbitrarily banning content based on their own whims and political biases for years, regardless of the written terms of service. It's just that there's a different executive in charge now with a different set of made-up rules. I'm baffled as to why anyone would care. The whole thing has long been a joke, nothing more than a platform for trolling.
- aurelwu 4y agotwitter policy talks about private information, but they seem to also take issue with public information (which is made somewhat more accessible if put into a tweet but still was public before. edit: seems to be as exploitable as ChatGPT (except from getting banned anyways because of no oversight ;) ) "What is not a violation of this policy?": Gossip, rumours, accusations, and allegations ---- so just preface the flight data info of Elon Musk with "I heard a drunkard say in my tavern that Sir Elon is at 49°21'43''W 38°20'59'N just recently
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mhoad 4y agoJust want to highlight that this is happening at the same time that they are rolling out a policy that will require everyone to provide their live location in order to serve them targeted ads.
- boopboopbadoop 4y agoAny links where I can read more about this?
- mirashii 4y agohttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/14/twitters-big-ad-plan-violate-both-ftc-consent-decree-california-privacy-law-to-force-users-to-hand-over-info-for-ad-targeting/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/14/twitters-big-ad-plan-vio...
- boopboopbadoop 4y agoThank you!
- lost_tourist 4y agoSo if I don't turn on location services on my iphone the app disables itself? lol I only turn on location for apple maps. twitter can just get uninstalled if they make such a requirement.
- nickthegreek 4y agoApparently it shows a full screen dialog that can only be dismissed by opting in. Selling the tracking data allows him to not have to rely on advertisers as much as they flee the platform. And even paying members have to do it, so he can make more on the paying members too.
- happyopossum 4y ago> they are rolling out a policy that will require everyone to provide their live location in order to serve them targeted ads It's happening at the same time that there is an unsupported rumor from unidentified sources claiming that Twitter is talking about doing that. They are not actually doing that now, nor do we know if they are discussing it. This is how news bifurcates into two sides - rumors are assumed to be facts by people when they support their internalized narratives, then get repeated as fact without context or any of the details.
- kranke155 4y agoInteresting to see Elon Jet Tracker was banned for unknowable reasons, apparently.
- mtmail 4y agohttps://twitter.com/GatesJets https://twitter.com/GatesJets is now also suspended. It wasn't a couple of hours ago when the elonjet was already suspended.
- andrepd 4y ago>Free speech! Absolutist free speech for everyone! People mock Musk >Ok except you can't impersonate people People mock Musk with accounts labelled "PARODY" >Ok you also can't do that People post 30-sec clips of him being booed >Ok, no posting videos of shows People track his private jet >Ok no location information (repeat ad nauseum) -- Honestly anybody who believes any word this guy says is a complete rube at this point. Billionaires have way to much influence and this needs to change in short order
- ascendantlogic 4y agoIt's amazing to me he still has his army of supporters after all this.
- rurp 4y agoGood summary. It boggles my mind that there are still people who think Elon bloviating about free speech is some good faith principle.
- SilverBirch 4y agoThis is going to be fun. Bots that just post “plane xyz has departed” - no personal info there! Bots that post - “Think Elons about to get high” no live location there. The moron flies back and forth between three damn airports on one airplane which publicly disclosed its flight plans, what does he think this is going to acheive? Oh apart from destroying Twitter as a platform for live events, protests, OSINT etc. It’s not that he does dumb stuff, it’s that systematically acts first and thinks later. Which is not what I would hope for from someone building autonomous cars, rockets, or brain implants.
- reb 4y ago> Oh apart from destroying Twitter as a platform for live events, protests, OSINT etc. Ding ding ding.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago"flies back and forth between three damn airports on one airplane which publicly disclosed its flight plans" That's the funny thing. He's got one of the most predictable private jets ever. It goes to the same 3 places 90% of the time.
- saimiam 4y agoThe destruction of Twitter as a viable tool for grassroots coordination _was_ the point of Musk buying Twitter with the help of sovereign funds of Arab countries.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoProtest organizers generally don't like this kind of live location tracking, and routinely ask attendees to turn off location services or leave their phones at home.
- anigbrowl 4y agoIt depends what sort of protest. 'A crowd of bad people have showed up to hassle Good Person - please come out to support if you can #worthycause' is very differnt from 'time to flex fellow #ideologybelievers you know what to do nudge nudge wink wink'.
- jmathai 4y agoWow. A lot more interesting than Twitter's rules and policies is learning that archive.org supports diffing between versions. That's the real story here.
- whit537 4y agoYeah, it's even half-way decent! :^)
- mullingitover 4y agoIf there a legitimate safety concern they'd be suing adsbexchange, since that's where all the flight trackers are sourcing their data, and it's trivial to just go to that site and route around twitter's ham-handed censorship. They're conspicuously not doing that.
- woodruffw 4y ago"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
- 323 4y agoI'm going to report the next CNN one-on-one interview from a public space. Let's see what they do. Or even better, a SpaceX launch.
- jonny_eh 4y agoIt's like a "No loitering" sign. Enforcement will be highly selective to only remove those that are undesirable for other reasons.
- LarryMullins 4y agoThis whole affair reminds me of the "Gawker Stalker" controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker#Gawker_Stalker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker#Gawker_Stalker
- fzeroracer 4y agoSo basically people raised enough stink that ElonJet was unbanned, but with the policy changes will likely be banned (again) but this time under the guise of violating the rules and policies. And now the other jet accounts are being removed as well in order provide convenient cover.
- meepmorp 4y agoYeah, kinda, but also it looks like it was unplanned. They only suspended the elonjet at first, then the rest of the guy's accounts 3-4 hours later, and finally whatever hastily constructed policy they're implementing now.
- falcolas 4y agoWell, there goes any linking to spacecraft trackers, since if they list the ISS they fall foul of this rule. Or to Nasa's homepage, since they often include the location of currently active crewed spacecraft. Probably can't link to SpaceX either, especially if they're running a crew up to the ISS. Or the plans/sightings of senators who escape to Cancun. Or "I met celebrity X on this flight and they were really awesome!" posts. Or...
- _JoRo 4y agoCommon sense says that this policy was not put in place to stop one-off photos of individuals, but to reasonably prevent individuals/groups from continuously tracking someone in realtime and broadcasting that information out to others. It will be interesting to see how it is enforced though.
- jedberg 4y agoA lot of people seem to be worried how this will effect various use cases, like coordinating protests and such. I wouldn't worry. This policy was made specifically so that Elon could take down the account that posts where his plane is and any reincarnation of that. It won't be enforced on anyone else, unless you're protesting Elon. Or one of his autocrat friends. In which case you should use a different platform anyway.
- sixothree 4y agoI am convinced he's going to start doxxing people on twitter in effect sending mobs after otherwise anonymous people. He has the ability. He's keeps being a creepy weirdo, so I guess it's just time.
- sixothree 4y agoSo I posted this yesterday. Today Elon posted a face and a license plate and basically told millions of people to "go get him". This is the new trend for him. I expect a lot more doxxings and literal mobs to come from Elon specifically.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoWhile I was homeless, I began getting really concerned about people knowing so much about my life and my physical location. I wrote about that in a piece called Lessons Learned from Writing the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. Excerpt: While homeless in Fresno, I began identifying myself online as "in California" and sometimes as "no longer in San Diego" but I intentionally did not actively advertise the move. A lot of people continued to believe I was in downtown San Diego well after I had left San Diego County entirely and my stress levels began to go down as people mistakenly assumed I was somewhere else. While homeless, I generally did not tell people where I was camping, either online or offline. I felt this was a safety issue. I didn't want people to know where I was camped. I am not a fan of Elon Musk, but the HN standard is to take a charitable interpretation of things where possible. The charitable interpretation is that he's socially awkward, overly in the limelight and learned a lesson the hard way about how online information about your whereabouts is potentially very dangerous information and decided to use his experience to inform company policy. As a footnote, I really, really like the way this was presented, showing the old and new policies side-by-side and highlighting the pertinent changes. Kudos to whomever put this together.
- fzeroracer 4y agoSorry, but I don't understand how you could take a charitable interpretation of Elon Musk's history when it comes to privacy. This is the same guy that hired a detective to try and investigate someone he disliked (the whole 'pedo guy' incident). He's been unmasking low level employees as rage bait for his Twitter crowd. He's shared sensitive information with far right individuals.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoNo one is a monolith and once someone has a "bad reputation" for a particular thing, good luck reversing it. I saw some tweet with him saying (rather stupidly) that he is so committed to free speech that he will not take down @elonjet and it was, of course, mocking the fact that it was now down. His previous position was dumb -- just like I was initially dumb to be sharing so much information about myself online, which brought out the worst in some people. I wasn't a "bad person" to be oversharing. I was naive. I had lived a very private life and it was really hard for me to figure out how to negotiate a relationship to the public. It was painful. I imagine that for a lot of things, such a wealthy man gets a lot of deference in face-to-face stuff. That can make it hard to get a good idea of what's real and what's just ass-kissing bullshit and that's not how the world really works. I wish HN would keep its dignity even if Elon Musk cannot seem to do so. And giving no room for any nuance in the discussion is not it.
- 323 4y ago> media depicting prisoners of war posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts on or after April 5, 2022. This is bizarrely specific. I have a feeling it's related to current events.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> This is bizarrely specific. I have a feeling it's related to current events. I suspect its either the exact first day of POW videos from Ukraine government accounts related to the Russian invasion, or deliberately chosen to be shortly before that; the targeting is transparently obvious. And, to be clear, those videos do raise real problems of where exactly the boundaries of the vague prohibition in the 3rd Geneva Convention of 1949 regarding protecting POWs from public curiosity are and ought to be drawn, and it might be reasonable for a social media outlet to adopt a blanket policy prohibiting videos of POWs (either generally, or by government sources, or with some other rule trying in good faith to address human rights.) But the construct of this rule makes it clear that that’s not the issue, that instead its about serving the propaganda interests of one side of a current conflict.
- Imnimo 4y agoRemember a few days ago when the so-called Twitter Files were supposed to convince us that moderation decisions at old Twitter weren't up to snuff? Maybe Bari Weiss can use her unfettered access to tell us what went into this new decision.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- trog 4y agoAre there any new rules about watching Elon discover nuance and subtlety in "freedom of speech" in real-time or is that still allowed
- janalsncm 4y agoIs there a list of actions post-Musk Twitter has taken that violate “free speech absolutism”? I feel like there should be.
- LinuxBender 4y agoOn the matter of enabling real time doxxing as being protected by free speech, we could perhaps take this a step further. Cell sites gather the real time GPS location of all cell phones whether geo-location is enabled in the phone or not on most phones. Even on the phones that do not support this there are commands to ping the location of all the phones, triggering the e911 functions in the modem. All phones manufactured for sale in the US after 1996 have this function. Activating this function does not provide feedback to the phone OS at all. I am curious what the public reaction would be if there was an API that could give the real time location of anyone by name, groups-of-people by location, IMSI, MSISDN, etc... regardless of the subscribers age. Would there be any push-back? Some cars also have this information. They are quite literally vessels by standard automotive terminology. Maritime laws require GPS data for all vessels and there are sites that track these vessels today. We could also track the location and speed of all cars and set up an API to query by location, license plate, vin number I think this may have already happened, owner name, owners license number. We could doxx people that are speeding, driving erratically, visiting an ex-lovers home. Insurance companies would certainly love this information. Some people volunteer it to insurance companies already for a discount but why not make it public? The police could see real time location and speed of every vessel with an expired registration. We could take this even further. Using cell phone and car data we could infer how often people drive their car vs using public transportation. Anyone exceeding a specific ratio of personal vehicle usage could have their personal ESG score modified and limit access to their CBDC bank account to discourage using cars until they ride the bus for a certain number of days per month. We could even confine their car to a specific approved geo-fence. All of these ideas are encapsulated within /s, obviously.
- taolegal 4y agoI have a hard time believing that the same crowd that is paranoid that there's a conspiracy to hunt down women seeking abortions through digital technology wouldn't also take issue with live location sharing. But maybe people are just monomaniacally obsessed. They need to direct their hatred at some target. They found Elon Musk after moving on from Trump, and they don't care at all about the substance of these matters.