A college student who tracks Elon Musk's and Mark Zuckerberg's private jets says his Threads accounts have been suspended

• Jack Sweeney said his Threads accounts tracking private jets' flight paths were suspended.
• Meta cited privacy-policy violations and the potential for physical harm as reasons.
• Sweeney's jet tracking has faced backlash, including legal threats from Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.

Jack Sweeney, a college student who tracks the private jets of several high-profile people, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, says his Threads accounts have been suspended.

In a statement posted on his personal account on Tuesday, Sweeney said all his jet-tracking accounts on the Meta-run platform had been suspended. He said he received no warnings or communications from the Big Tech company before the accounts were suspended.

Sweeney's accounts tracking the flight paths of jets belonging to Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump were among those affected.

When asked about the suspended accounts, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider: "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."

Sweeney did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside of normal working hours.

Over the past few years Sweeney has tracked and shared the flight data of some of the world's most powerful people. The data shared on the accounts is publicly available through the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Sweeney started by sharing data from the ADS-B Exchange on Twitter, now X, using automated bots. He expanded to Instagram and Threads and launched his own database for monitoring aircraft.

The accounts have caused controversy and upset some powerful people, including Musk and Taylor Swift. Both have threatened Sweeney with lawsuits, with Swift saying the accounts constituted "stalking and harassing behavior."

Sweeney first made headlines in 2022 after Musk offered him money to stop publicly sharing his flight information. At the time, Sweeney was a freshman at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, studying information technology.

He previously told BI he tried negotiating a higher price but never heard back from Musk.

In December 2022, Twitter suspended Sweeney's jet-tracking accounts. Musk, who had taken over the social-media company months earlier, called the accounts a "physical safety violation."

Since then, the company has updated its policies to restrict users from sharing other people's live locations.