Oct 23, 2024 11:34 AM IST
Jack Sweeney made social media bots tracking private jets of Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and even Russian oligarchs, apart from Musk, Zuckerberg
The Threads account of Jack Sweeney, a college student who tracks the paths of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s private jets, has been suspended, with Meta citing privacy policy violations and potential physical harm as reasons, according to a Business Insider report.
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Who is Jack Sweeney?
Jack Sweeney, an information technology student at the University of Central Florida, had become famous for creating Twitter bots which track the paths of private jets belonging to many prominent individuals such as Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and even Russian oligarchs, apart from Musk and Zuckerberg.
However, all this data is also publicly available through the US Federal Aviation Administration. What Sweeney does is build bots which take this data and broadcast it on social media.
He started off on Twitter (Now known as X), but expanded to Instagram and Threads and even launched his own database for monitoring the aircraft.
Unsurprisingly this has resulted in controversy. Both Musk and Swift had threatened Sweeney with lawsuits and the singer had even referred to the accounts as showcasing “stalking and harassing behavior.”
Musk even offered him money in 2022 to stop sharing the information, which made headlines. However, he never heard back from Musk after trying to negotiate a higher price.
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His X account finally got suspended in December 2022 after Musk acquired the platform and called it a “physical safety violation,” and updated the policies of X to restrict users from sharing the live locations of other people.
Sweeney in a post on his personal account, said that all his jet-tracking accounts were suspended from Threads with him receiving no warnings or communications from Meta as well.
“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,” the report quoted a Meta spokesperson as saying.
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