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Jack Sweeney: He has caused a stir around the world with online accounts for celebrities' private jet flights

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Christopher Spata / ZUMA Wire / IMAGO

Jack Sweeney is in trouble with a megastar, again. As the Washington Post has now revealed, the student from Florida received letters from lawyers in December and January asking him to

stop

distributing the flight details of Taylor Swift's private jet via his social media accounts. Online accounts like "Taylor Swift's Jets" have caused "direct and irreparable harm" to the singer and her family, according to one of the letters, which, according to the Washington Post, comes from a law firm that represents Swift. "While for you this may be a game or a path from which you hope to gain wealth or fame, for our client it is a matter of life and death," the letter quotes. Taylor Swift often has problems with stalkers.

While such a lawyer's letter could quickly cause other Internet users to panic, Sweeney remains calm. The 21-year-old sees this as an attempt to intimidate him into sharing publicly available data. His accounts provide only a partial sketch of the cities where Swift might be, he points out, similar to public hints of concerts she might attend or football games she might attend. The cease and desist notice was also sent at a time when Swift was being criticized for the impact of her private flights on the environment.

The current pressure situation is not new for Sweeney. The software developer and computer science student at the University of Central Florida has been using bots to track the flights of celebrities online, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. And he has already quarreled with the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, because of exactly this tracking. Like Swift, the Tesla boss was very bothered by the fact that Sweeney used accounts called ElonJet to point out where his private jet had taken off and landed.

Musk flights only appear with a time delay on X

As part of his dispute with Sweeney, Musk even changed X's platform rules in 2022; the original ElonJet account was blocked as a result of the conflict. Sweeney is now active again on X, but all information about Musk's flights only appears there with an artificial time delay of at least 24 hours, via an account called ElonJetNextDay. This is different on Mastodon, where Musk does not have sovereignty over the platform - here the data is more current. As a basis for his bots, Jack Sweeney uses information from the US Federal Aviation Administration as well as data posted online by people who track aircraft as a hobby. This information is generally public and can also be found on numerous flight tracking websites online.

Following the news that Swift's lawyers had written to Sweeney, Elon Musk commented on X that the 21-year-old was "a terrible person." Taylor Swift is right to be worried, says the multi-billionaire. Jack Sweeney, in turn, countered Musk's insult with reference to a media report from November. The article from "Business Insider" was about court documents, according to which a person from the musician Grimes' legal team is said to have tracked Musk's jet flights for days so that custody papers could be served to him. According to media reports, Grimes and Musk have three children together.

Jack Sweeney also emphasized on Tuesday that Elon Musk once offered him $5,000 to take his service offline. "You also threatened to sue me," he wrote to the entrepreneur via "To stand by an idea" contained. You can interpret all of this as: Sweeney doesn't want to be beaten down, neither by the richest man in the world nor by the most popular musician in the world at the moment.

Instagram and Facebook have taken Swift accounts offline

When asked by the Washington Post whether there was evidence that Taylor Swift's stalkers had used her private jet data, a spokeswoman from Swift's environment said: "We cannot comment on ongoing police investigations, but we can confirm "That the timing of stalkers suggests a connection." Elon Musk also argued at the end of 2022 that the ElonJet project posed a risk to his personal safety. With a video clip, he drew attention to a stalking incident in his family's environment.

What happens next with the accounts for Taylor Swift's flights will become clear in the next few weeks. Sweeney's Swift accounts are currently offline on Instagram and Facebook; according to the Washington Post, Meta has taken them offline. At

“This is not about putting a GPS tracker on someone and invading their privacy,” the Washington Post quoted Sweeney’s lawyer as saying. Rather, it's about using public information to track a public figure's jet. The threats from Swift's legal team are a means to get rid of a PR problem for the singer and to harass his client.

He had already publicly stated in November that Sweeney wanted to continue working on his tracking projects. At that time, Forbes included him on a top 30 under 30 list for North America in the consumer technology sector. Sweeney was honored for his bots. The well-known business magazine praised the student as having “helped journalists, researchers and hobbyists track aircraft via social media.”

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