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
      393·
      7 days 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.

      • uzay@infosec.pubEnglish
        4·
        7 days ago

        If they are public, no it is not illegal. If they are not public, but I have them because I provide a service to you, then yes it is illegal (most likely). In this case it is public information, and not even personal information. It is a plane identifier and that plane’s location. The only reason that tells you anything about it’s passenger is because said passenger is rich and entitled enough to own their own plane and use it for themself. It’s like buying the Empire State Building to live there by yourself and then complaining about someone tweeting out your address.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
        74·
        7 days 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
        15·
        7 days 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.