> it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details
If the change in ownership means "I am never going back, time to set that bridge on fire" he's absolutely right it's "safer". Or simply if he thinks "It is now acceptable to future employers to do this", it is also safer.
Or maybe it was something that he now sees as a greater threat, and therefore is worth mentioning even if is not safer or even riskier.
It depends on what you mean by liability. If you mean they have a 7+ year NDA, and the NDA covers undone features. then, yeah I guess Musk is more likely to sue. Maybe. Or maybe he'll love getting to shout how he would never do that, look how cool he is.
They (the telcos) only have stats on their customers. Twitter has it for anyone running twitter. Further, twitters location data is likely more accurate than the telco due to positioning from stuff like wifi names, local gps, etc.
when the covid-19 pandemic came into real force (May?) I definitely saw a sample report from MAPBOX that showed aggregate consumer movement in the New England area, with extensive, quantitative classification on visits to retail, restaurant and public sites like schools. The visual was each and every individual track, but as lines of the same color. So the data on each individual track was there, but not named in the report. There were hundreds of thousands of input tracks, for some time range. The context was "were people violating lockdown, travelling to what destination" .. retail and restaurant were very prominent in the report.
(As an aside, it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details, but I'm glad he did)