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.”

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

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

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

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

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

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

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      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.

        • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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          3 months 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.

          • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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            3 months 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.

          • uzay@infosec.pub
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            3 months 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.

      • Arkouda@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        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.

      • Lennny@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

      • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Facebook doesn’t hand out your personal information to others

        Huh? How do you think ad targeting works?

        • ReginaPhalange@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          “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.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              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.

        • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          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.

          • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            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.

            • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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              3 months ago

              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.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        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…

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    We must all collectively, start using Forums again.

    “Well my Discord server is…”

    I SAID FORUMS!

    • AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
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      3 months ago

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

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • Rhoeri@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

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

    • 1984@lemmy.today
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

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

      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          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.