Twitter owner Elon Musk last week suspended the account of a Florida student who was posting the location of private jets, including Musk’s. He suggested the student was tweeting out his "assassination coordinates.”
The shutdowns escalated to include prominent journalists and other accounts that had discussed his plane’s location — although the former were later reinstated. To justify the move, he rewrote some of Twitter’s policies to try and stop people from sharing those details.
But some of the information Musk was concerned about on Twitter is publicly available, due to dramatic improvements in how the aviation system tracks aircraft to ensure a high level of safety and to improve efficiency. Untangling privacy concerns from the improvements in the underlying technology isn’t easy, say aviation experts.
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