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

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

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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      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.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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        You are right the stupid peasants just too stupid to understand big brain things like privacy 🤡

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          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.

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            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.

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            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.

          • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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            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.

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        Facebook doesn’t hand out your personal information to others

        Huh? How do you think ad targeting works?

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          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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            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.

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              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.

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                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

        • ReginaPhalange@lemmy.world
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          “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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              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.

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

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        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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        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.

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      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.

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

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    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.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        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…

  • MaxPow3r11@lemmy.world
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    Fuck Mark Zuckerberg.

    Fuck Elon Musk.

    Fuck Jack Dorsey.

    Fuck Daniel Ek.

    Fuck all these fucks.

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

    • gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      i guess celebritiy just means how well a person is known about/what for around the world, most people know about jeff bezos

    • Miaou@jlai.lu
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      If you know their name, they are probably a celebrity. That’s kind of the definition

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    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.

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    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.

  • FreakinSteve@lemmy.world
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    Now you know who they’re for. Not like we did t know from the beginning, which is why I never used it

    • r00ty@kbin.life
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      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.

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        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.

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    @elonjet@mastodon.social is still functional, for those who want to follow from the Fediverse.

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      Thank you. I plan to follow all this jet accounts and expect a Barbra streisand effect. Do you know more in the fediverse?