Celebrity jet-tracking accounts have vanished from Threads and Instagram
www.theverge.com
It's a bad week for the creator of @ElonJet.

Jack Sweeney, who gained notoriety for his @ElonJet account on X and maintained many of the suspended accounts, said on Threads that the development is “reminiscent of all my accounts getting suspended on Twitter.” The shuttered accounts, which used publicly available data to show the flight paths of private jets, initially displayed a message on Monday that read, “The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”

Meta provided no direct warning or explanation for the suspensions, according to Sweeney, who says the accounts appear “blacked out with no options to interact or receive information.” In a statement to TechCrunch, however, an unnamed Meta spokesperson said “Given the risk of physical harm to individuals, and in keeping with the independent Oversight Board’s recommendation, we’ve disabled these accounts for violating our privacy policy.”

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeEnglish
      272·
      8 hours ago

      My name, address and phone number are public too but if you were to share it on social media you’d be breaking the law.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
        48·
        7 hours ago

        https://flightradar24.com

        All I need is your flight number. You don’t know how any of this works, do you?

        You don’t even need the Internet, just search up ADS-B receivers on Amazon. The plane and the ATC system itself is tattling on you every second, blasting your position out over the air.

      • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        5 hours ago

        If you put your name, address and phone number on a public forum and someone shares that do you think that’s breaking the law? Doxxing generally applies to making personal identifiable information public without that persons consent. Those celebrities are making their own data public, or rather their private jets are because they’re required to publicly broadcast their location in real time.

        If those accounts are collecting public information they’re not doing anything illegal. Otherwise we might as well call libraries illegal because they contain a registry of every book author whose book is in the library.