- Jack Sweeney’s Threads accounts that track the flight paths of private jets have been suspended.
- Meta cited privacy policy violations and potential physical harm as reasons for the suspensions.
- Sweeney’s jet-tracking has faced backlash, including legal threats from Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
Jack Sweeney, a college student who tracks the private jets of several high-profile people, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, says his Threads accounts have been suspended.
In a statement posted via his personal account, Sweeney said all of his jet-tracking accounts had been suspended from the Meta-run platform. He said he received no warnings or communications from the Big Tech company before the accounts were suspended.
Sweeney’s accounts, which tracked the flight paths of jets belonging to Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, along with Meta’s CEO Zuckerberg, were among those affected.
When asked about the suspended accounts, a spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider: “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.”
Sweeney did not immediately respond to a request for comment made by Business Insider outside of normal working hours.
Over the past few years, Sweeney has tracked and shared the flight data for some of the world’s most powerful people. The data shared on the accounts is publicly available through the US Federal Aviation Administration, which Sweeney then distributes via social media accounts.
Sweeney started by sharing data from the ADS-B Exchange on Twitter, now X, using automated bots. He has since expanded his accounts to Instagram and Threads and launched his own database for monitoring aircraft.
The accounts have caused controversy and upset some powerful people, including Musk and Swift. Both have threatened Sweeney with separate lawsuits, with Swift referring to the accounts as “stalking and harassing behavior.”
The college student first made headlines in 2022 after Musk offered him money to stop publicly sharing his flight information. At the time, Sweeney was a freshman at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, studying information technology.
He previously told BI he tried negotiating a higher price tag but never heard back from Musk.
In December 2022, Sweeney’s jet-tracking accounts were suspended by X. Musk, who took over the social media company months earlier, called the accounts a “physical safety violation.”
Since then, X has updated its policies to restrict users from sharing other people’s live locations.
Read the full article here
