Meta has suspended several Threads and Instagram accounts that track the private jets of celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump

ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 948 points – Celebrity jet-tracking accounts have vanished from Threads and Instagram
theverge.com

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.”

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The irony of Meta/Facebook - infamous for tracking people online - being upset about jet tracking.

Rules and laws are only for the peasantry. Your level of freedom is proportional to your wealth, so Meta has a whole lotta Freedom™️

It's not even tracking... Tracking is what the FAA does, and makes publicly available. These accounts are just publishing the already-public information.

Fuck every one of these shitty billionaires. Fly commercial if you don't want to be tracked publicly.

Obviously the way around this is to make an account that responds to any message containing a plane ID, and another that retweets it.

Tracking those jets isn’t the issue. It’s sharing that information publicly. Facebook doesn’t hand out your personal information to others, and if you think they do, then you don’t understand how targeted ads work.

That information is already public, how do you think he gets it?

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.

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.

Source?

I believe it's prohibited under GDPR as well as many local laws.

I don’t live there.

Do you think there shouldn't be any laws prohibiting the sharing of people's personal information like that?

No, I don't think phone books should be illegal.

The websites track the planes not the individuals.

The planes might be flying empty. It has nothing to do with GDPR.

Is that question really "in good-faith" to "that law doesn't apply in my country"?

Finnish law doesn’t apply if you aren’t in Finland.

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.

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.

Facebook doesn’t hand out your personal information to others

Huh? How do you think ad targeting works?

"Show my ad to hornly lonely 13 y/o that suffer from Tourette"
vs
"Here is a list of 13 y/o that suffer from Tourette"

One of these options is less profitable for an ad network in the long run.

Did you all forget about Cambridge Analytica?

It's funny how people who get their news exclusively from their Facebook feeds have never heard of Cambridge Analytica. I can't imagine how that could happen.

It has been over 6 years. I guess a lot of users has been too young to care.

An advertiser contacts Facebook and says, 'We’d like to advertise this product to a specific group of people,' and Facebook says, 'Sure, hand us your money and the ad you'd like us to display,' and then targets that ad to the desired audience. At no point does Facebook hand over user data to the advertiser.

For example, if I want to advertise my home renovation services to all the elderly home owners in my city, then what use would it be for me if they just handed me a list of those people? None. They're the advertising platform. It's them who targets those ads.

Except you can add a tracking pixel to the destination website after people click through on the ad, which correlates to people's individual profile. To say that isn't "handing out personal information to others" is sophistry of the highest order.

They're not handing out personal information. If you hide stuff like that in your ad links then you're the malicious actor, not facebook.

You may want to familiarize yourself with how their tracking pixel works. In brief, you add a line of code (provided by Facebook) to any given website and on page load that code displays a 1x1px transparent image from Facebook's servers that allows them to establish a correlation between the loading of that website and the identity of the person logged in to Facebook on that browser. it isn't "hiding" anything or circumventing Facebook in any way. It's a core part of their advertising offerings. https://www.facebook.com/business/goals/retargeting

Facebook doesn’t hand out your personal information to others, and if you think they do, then you don’t understand how targeted ads work.

It is explicitly stated in the TOS that Meta does indeed hand out your personal information to others.

If you think they don't, read the TOS.

Meta absolutely sells your data. Check out Meta Pixel. A suite you can ad to your website to send and receive said data. Also EU fined them 1.2B for selling data of EU citizens.

You are right the stupid peasants just too stupid to understand big brain things like privacy 🤡

Zuckerberg’s $300 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511

It is currently in San Diego at Broadway Pier. Which was also confirmed by yesterday’s news of a methed up Florida man being arrested at gun point for sneaking aboard and throwing things off into the water LOL https://youtu.be/L7nnKn1W4Mw

I wish he did more damage. Fuck these billionaires and their 300 million dollar yachts. Most Americans are struggling to buy groceries.

This all feels very Streisand Effect. I don’t care about these accounts, but the more attempts there are to suppress them… the more they feel important.

you know where this wouldn't happen?

Mastodon.

A few are on Mastodon! https://grndcntrl.net/links/#ElonJet

why are you purple?

I make ur app

Prolly my new fav dev of all time after this gem Cheers all! I fucking looove Voyager btw

Just curious – which app is that? Seemingly not Eternity, as I'm using that, and you do not appear purple in here, but I'm always interested in exploring alternatives to the apps I'm using.

Except it can would and does. Lots of instances with overzealous owners/moderators that defederate or remove anything they don't like

Is it possible to migrate one's account to a new Mastodon server, while keeping the followers one had in the old server?

Fuck corporate social media

https://mastodon.social/@JxckS

Seriously threads and bluesky are false promises, the rest of the fediverse might grow and innovate slowly but it is genuine growth on genuinely community owned platforms.

Bluesky and threads are visions of the past wearing the future's clothes. They are investor backed and fundamentally and irrevocably for profit ventures.

Do not be seduced into wasting your time in stuck in the past, this is a perfect reminder we already know where it will end no matter what their precariously employed devs say.

I wouldn't lump bluesky in the same pile as threads anymore, the atprotocol is fully up and running and slowly but surely individually hosted data servers are trickling out and away to their own services.

There's even new services running completely independent of bluesky running on atproto now: https://whtwnd.com/about

There's a really good write-up on how atproto federation works here: https://whtwnd.com/alexia.bsky.cyrneko.eu/3l727v7zlis2i

This is why we need to bring back the old internet, not this corposhit.

I remember when you didn’t have to type carefully in the comments.

I had my comments removed over and over again on a video about Kurt Cobain recently. I had to type something like, “When he decided to take a vacation away from the planet earth with a traditional 20th century raygun that fired ammunition meant for birds rather than rays or lasers meant for people and space aliens.”

Meanwhile, “the Jews control all information and have space lasers and and and they put chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay” and the like doesn’t get removed.

What a world.

We live in an era where the truth is the most offensive thing you can say..... Or anything funny... or... really anything outside of being overly moronic or hateful

They can ban that but can't do anything about misinformation, scammers, bots and shit

That's how you recognize bullshit. If there was a kernel of truth worth protecting the offending posts would be removed.

Officially, "its too hard". Realistically, they don't do shit because those shits bring in money by paying for exposition

Mango Mussolini's flights are paid for by the tax payers through the USAF and those flights should be tracked.

Just make a damn website already

It's public information transmitted over airwaves and several sites exist already. Flightradar24 and adsbexchange are the two I use, though Elon and Taylor Swift are far too boring to pay attention to when you can watch refuelers and jets instead.

But when you report obvious fake accounts that merely exist for 5 days, follow 5000 people already and only have 3 followers themselves but a nice spammy link in their profile, they allegedly don’t violate any terms of services…

The harm to people flying in private jets is much more important than spam links. According to their own "Oversight Board".

Not sure who needs to hear this but the amount of money spent on private jets by these billionaires in 1 year could replace all our lead pipes in the USA.

Corporate censorship. These companies are too powerful and tyrannical.

how much longer will we allow them to conspire against us?

@bungalowtill @ForgottenFlux

we have to take the steps to not use their platform, or better yet, start a Fediverse server of their own.

I was able to do it myself! the cost of running a Lemmy and Mastodon instance for myself is so cheap... I'm actually shocked more people aren't doing it!

I was able to do it myself! the cost of running a Lemmy and Mastodon instance for myself is so cheap… I’m actually shocked more people aren’t doing it!

I mean what for? It costs even less to use an existing Lemmy or Mastodon server given the minimal load you add.

@Carighan cause I don't have to play by someone elses rules if they decide to change them when they want.

the Reddit API situation opened my eyes. I pay less than 20 bucks a month and host my family and friends, worth it 🙂

Zuck creating a safe-space for billionaire private jet owners on Meta isn't something I ever thought I would read, but here we are.

Given the risk of physical harm to individuals

Their private security details aren't enough?

Not to mention the data is publicly accessible.

Those rich fuckers can fly commercial like the rest of us. Upgrade to first and business class and suck it up.

I just took an 80min flight recently. For shits I looked at the first class upgrade option. It cost three times as much as my coach ticket. I hate flying, and I think airplanes are cramped and very uncomfortable, but I can't imagine choosing to have a tiny bit bigger seat for an 80min flight over buying two other people tickets or supporting a charity or just buying extra drugs that week. The amount of disposable income or pathological obsession with status to flagrantly make the choice to buy a first class ticket astounds me.

I'd have to guess a lot of the time is companies eating the cost for their people to fly first class rather then it being common for a rando looking to take a flight booking first class

Yup. Companies have many times the money a single person does, so they'll shell out for it. Usually it's managers and execs who get upgrades, and the regular workers who get economy.

Free food and drinks (and I mean real beer and mid tier liquor, and actual food not snacks) in a much much nicer lounge is worth its weight in gold if you fly a lot of have a long layover. If you're flying 15000 miles a year those upgrades become much cheaper (like more than 50% off) on many flights.

I wonder what a flight with Taylor Swift onboard would look like.

Extra hassle for flight attendants? The taxpayer would probably pay a couple bucks for a cop at departing and arriving terminals.

Tour buses seem reasonable.

Yet, Meta cannot do anything about hate speech...

unless its against zionism

Or if you make a self-deprecating joke about being white and get banned for 3 months.... Like I did once (Yet oddly the various reports I made about death threats against me on the basis of me being trans "Do not violate Facebook's terms of service" according to the automated responses)

I actually stopped using facebook to protect my META Account since I..... used to do VR before I got too lazy to do VR.... and developers got too lazy to make games for VR...

We must all collectively, start using Forums again.

"Well my Discord server is.."

I SAID FORUMS!

Discord is an alternative to IRC, the fact that people use it as a replacement for forums is baffling

Not baffling, infuriating, we've all gotten lazier over time and we want everything in one place.

Thing is, when we were on forums and IRC, we only had to play by the rules of the admins.... Now we're under the thumbs of corporations...

You're a bootlicker if you're on threads, simple as

God damn... Somebody out doing me on calling this pathological behavior

🫡

It blows my mind that people still use Facebook. What more can Zuckerberg do before people decide to ditch his shit?

Ordinary people use it to try and talk to their friends, while being bombarded with shit and exploited.

They also use windows that do the same thing, and probably are used to being treated like that in exchange for free stuff.

It's just we who know tech that thinks it's absurd to allow ourselves to be treated like that, by people who are awful and rich.

They also use windows that do the same thing

It's a windows thing... But I know what you mean. The solution is Linux once again...

Deleted mine a long time ago and life got so much better. I still have friends that use it religiously and are on it every day like their life depends on it... Crazy.

Billionaires are celebrities now? Like that's true for Taylor Swift, but Bezos?

If you know their name, they are probably a celebrity. That's kind of the definition

i guess celebritiy just means how well a person is known about/what for around the world, most people know about jeff bezos

Fuck Mark Zuckerberg.

Fuck Elon Musk.

Fuck Jack Dorsey.

Fuck Daniel Ek.

Fuck all these fucks.

the accounts should be used to inform where the tracking information is collected to instead of being the sole container for it. Never trust that anything you do is safe on corporate servers

Now I really want to know where all of these people are going that they have to hide it from the rest of the world.

Are there any communities on Lemmy that do anything similar?

Not lemmy (unless it does support it now?). But from a (k/m)bin instance you can access the mastadon account @elonjet which does the same as the original twitter elonjet.

Any client that can interpret Mastodon data can access it. I don't believe Lemmy yet has the ability to follow individual users in that way.

Now you know who they're for. Not like we did t know from the beginning, which is why I never used it

I mean... SAM would track them better than any account!