Taylor Swift threatens legal action against student’s celebrity jet tracker
Taylor Swift, who famously sang, “My baby is fly like a jet stream,” threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the Florida college student who runs social media accounts dedicated to tracking celebrities’ private jet movements, according to The Washington Post.
Sweeney uses publicly available data from the Federal Aviation Administration to track the private jet use of hundreds of celebrities, politicians, billionaires, and other public figures. He makes the information widely available by posting on accounts across social media platforms like X / Twitter.
Swift’s legal team sent the University of Central Florida sophomore a cease-and-desist last December, asserting that she would “have no choice but to pursue any and all legal remedies” if he did not stop his “stalking and harassing behavior.” The letter also claimed that Sweeney’s accounts caused the pop star and her family “direct and irreparable harm, as well as emotional and physical distress.” Sweeney shared the letter with The Washington Post.
In the letter, Swift’s lawyer, Katie Wright Morrone, went on to write that there is “no legitimate interest in or public need for this information, other than to stalk, harass, and exert dominion and control.” The cease-and-desist arrived at the same time Swift was under fire for topping a list of celebrities whose jets emitted the most CO2 emissions. Facebook and Instagram disabled Sweeney’s accounts dedicated to Swift last December.
In the past couple of weeks, there’s been heightened interest in Swift’s movements as fans speculate whether she’ll make it to the Super Bowl on Feb. 11 after her concert in Tokyo the night before.
This isn’t the first time Sweeney has come under fire. In 2022, after Elon Musk slid into Sweeney’s DMs to get him to remove his X / Twitter bot dedicated to tracking Musk’s jet @ElonJet, the platform banned him and his accounts. Now, his posts tracking both Musk and Swift’s jets are published on X / Twitter with a 24-hour delay to abide by their ban on real-time location tracking. However, Sweeney still posts real-time tracking on Swift’s jet on other platforms.
Meanwhile, fans are hoping that Swift will take legal action against a more pressing issue: deepfakes.