We show that the position operator with commuting components proposed by M. Hawton [M. Hawton, Phys. Rev. A 59, 954 (1999)] and developed in subsequent papers, including the recent ones, does not have the properties required for a photon position operator. Depending on the exact interpretation of the results it either concerns a triplet of massless spin zero particles rather than the photon, or does not have the required covariance properties under space rotations.

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