Twitter also sold data access to Cambridge Analytica researcher
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/batch-historica... (new doc for Gnip API)
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/overview... (new doc for Gnip API)
Next thing we'll learn some company is indexing public websites and allows people to search in those too!
I personally can't see any logic why political ads would be different than coffee machine ads - both try to convince me to do something. It's just there's no organized movement united by hate of coffee machines, so nobody makes a fuss about coffee machine ads.
In a few decades, "future HN"-reader will talk about how those regulation are stifling innovation by rising the bar of entry to any business managing user data, leaving the big players with an unfair advantage. Surely the world would be a better place if information was free to share ?
> “In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.”
Facebook kept changing their message regarding the affected accounts, from nothing to 87M and now possibly way more.
There's a possibility that Twitter might have sold DM information as well. Under any other circumstance they would have some presumption of good faith, but given what happened with Facebook there's a good chance we will hear more.
Do you have any specific reason to mention that or are we just listing all data they have?
> Direct Messages are the private side of Twitter. You can use Direct Messages to have private conversations with people about Tweets and other content.
I think @stingraycharles was surprised by the response because the discussion surrounded publicly accessible information. The poster might not have realized that Twitter had information that is reasonably considered "private" as well. If DM information (metadata or raw messages) were made available, that would be surprising to millions of Twitter users. And I think we will see more scrutiny of Twitter and other companies in the coming months regarding the use of "private" information.
Unless, of course, you believe that SV and tech companies are not to be trusted in the first place, in which case none of this would be surprising or shocking.
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/direct-messages
No, there’s not. They don’t sell DMs.
Edit: For clarification, it matters if whom you contacted is shared even if the content is not.
Haha - you'd be stupid to think that twitter doesn't do this.
Hell, library of congress archived the full firehose from 2010 until now - and now it will only archive "select content"
Gee - thats because POTUS is using it as his primary platform and a POLICY platform.
So -- it would seem clear that they are using 6-degrees from any and all that comment and RT POTUS tweets, and any other's that they want.
but just because lib of congress is no longer slurping that firehose up -- does not mean that other 5Eyes are not. I think it would be myopically foolish to think that after the NSA was caught intercepting HW and installing spying tech into it, that they wouldn't be doing it for twitter+DMs as well.
Further, FB is doing the same.
Library Of Congress Will No Longer Archive Every Tweet
Since 2010, Library of Congress has been archiving every single public tweet: Yours, ours, the president's.
But today, the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and "big if true"s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets "on a very selective basis."
The library says it began archiving tweets "for the same reason it collects other materials — to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people." The archive stretches back to Twitter's beginning, in 2006.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/26/573609499...
Source: I had a GNIP account.
Not that it's wrong, but Facebook seems to exist in this grey zone of semi-private content which gives it both sorts of challenges and none of the usual defences.
Twitter is 100% public like a website and the expectation isn’t the same. When you friend or unfriend someone on FB you are somewhat implying who you give access to your feed.
They would've known, had they read the dialog they had to accept to access their much desired quiz.
> They would've known, had they read the dialog they had to accept to access their much desired quiz.
You do remember Facebook would share your friends' data with the quiz along with yours? Your friends never got a vague click-thru warning when you accessed your "much desired quiz."
https://img.ientry.com/webpronews/article_pics/facebook-perm...
If you can't read and understand that I'm sure you can collect disability checks from the government
When it comes to computers there is a WIDE divide between can't read and doesn't read. I'm sure nearly every person in tech has at some point in their life had an encounter with a non-technical user who, given an error message that clearly states the problem, has selective blindness and doesn't read the error message but rather just clicks 'okay' and can't figure out what the problem was. They could read the error message but have effectively been trained not to.
Similarly facebook users could read that message detailing how their privacy is about to be violated, but have probably been trained not to care.
I'm of the opinion that this is definitely something that has occurred and it has been done very, very deliberately. The media and ad industry and companies like fb work(ed) very hard to encourage people that:
* they should give up privacy in return for (carefully metered out dopamine hits) shiny things.
* they should give up more data and privacy because they've given up x much already
* They've given up all this stuff, fb/et etc already knows everything so they don't have any privacy so why bother protecting stuff _now_
* They gave up all this stuff and look, nothing bad has happened, so if you want privacy, you must be hiding something/a terrorist/a paedophile/etc.
And thus we arrive where we are now. Trying to convince people to take back some privacy and control to un-fuck the whole situation is an uphill battle, because those whose interests are in retaining control and lack of privacy are very well resourced and have gone to great effort to hide negative effects from the users and convince them of their non-existence.
The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that facebook users using these kind of quiz apps simply didn't care about privacy. When presented with that dialog they shrug and clicked through. Privacy was something they didn't take seriously at the time, if ever. The two big fuckups by facebook, imho, are:
1) Allowing such privacy invasion, knowing that foolish users would fall for it. They should have protected their users by forbidding this sort of thing in the first place even if their users were too foolish to desire such protection.
2) Allowing careless users to give away information about their friends, many of whom would have avoided such "quiz apps" but got sucked up by the apps because of their careless friends.
It's the same for any language. For example I can read French and Portuguese but I can't write them. Also I can read very fancy English texts but my writing is very basic.
Let me stop you right there. We're talking about people who are using quiz apps here...
It may feel that way, but it is an unrealistic expectation. Something shared with hundreds of people is effectively public information. To believe otherwise is a fantasy.
In “the real world”, we intuitively understand this: a secret told to two dozen people is a secret no more. But the illusion of control on social media sites seems to convince people otherwise online.
Not everyone is a highly technical person and to lump everyone into this category is not right. Try explaining this to elderly users.
For example, you might post pictures of your college reunion, and not share them with work colleagues because you want to maintain a more professional kind of relationship with them. But you shouldn't expect any confidentiality for things that happened at a 200-person event.
A real world example is meeting up with your friends at the bar and running into a coworker. You aren't prohibiting your coworkers from seeing you out with your friends, but you also aren't affirmatively sharing that part of your life with them. And what is appropriate to coincidentally be seen doing is different than what is appropriate to actively share in certain contexts.
Facebook clearly is a public forum. It clearly has shared private data with CA. Both of these issues deserve to be discussed, and both will have different, possibly even conflicting outcomes.
And really, that same thing could be true for, say, cable companies as well - they provide a public service, and they are regulated by a local franchising authority. We don't currently see content regulation, but if your local cable provider started, say, providing a channel dedicated to cannibalism, you might see changes in that. At the same time, the subscriber lists are considered private, and sale of them is regulated.
The main reason you don't see much of a mix here is that pre-Internet communication is mostly of the broadcasting type, which has only very few areas where private data actually exists.
Facebook is not clearly a public forum. My close friends do not constitute the public, yet CA got access to data that only those close friends would have otherwise seen.
In light of these, categorical statements about all of Facebook is not very meaningful.
Sounds like 'honor among thieves' when talking simply about attorney-client privilege is only honored between and in only those in the legal field?
I'm not being obtuse - serious question.
By one of them employing the other as an attorney (attorneys are private citizens).
(There are other similar but not strictly equivalente privileges, such as physician-patient, accountant-client, clergy-penitent, and marital privileges.)
> What is the reason that such privacy 'rights' are exclusive to conversations between an attorney and a person/entity.
Attorney-client privilege is needed because effective assistance of counsel requires people not to fear increasing their legal jeopardy through honest communication with their attorney.
This means they keep track of who you follow and what you click on.
I don't want to be the alarmist but it's not like twitter has a good track record when it comes to database leak and god knows how many influent politics are using it ...
No one yet complained that they can't Tweet while watching porn.
You need to install three extensions just to battle all this abuse. Getting a browser ready to surf the web in 2018 is like preparing to invade Normandy, and quite absurd.
Based on Wikipedia: > Abuse is the improper usage or treatment of an entity, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit.
That seems like they used the API improperly to access his friends information and got the friends information.
For sure Facebook shouldn't have given that information, but it was also clear that information wasn't supposed to be there, that Cambridge Analytica were aware of it and abused it.
That was expected and agreed to behavior by all parties (users, developers, and Facebook) at the time. I know it’s out of fashion in 2018 to acknowledge that TOS exist and that users should have read them before agreeing to them (or at least before complaining after the fact), but this is the reality.
The “abuse” part was that you were supposed to only access data that was necessary for the operation of your app. Accessing friends’ profile information to make an app that shows people who work at the same company as you, for example, was completely acceptable and a good use case. Collecting it for purposes unrelated to the stated purpose of the app was and is abuse. The Obama For America app also abused the platform in this way, but on a vastly larger scale - they pulled the entire US social graph (about 4x as many profiles as Kogan had) after less than 1 million people actually authorized the app and used it in all sorts of ways outside their app. This technique was widely celebrated in the press, right up until the “wrong” candidate won.
It's not "out of fashion," it's unrealistic and unreasonable.
If everyone fully read and understood every TOS and EULA they're affected by, along with all the unilateral changes they also usually "agree" to be bound by in the future, everyone would spend so much time reading them that they'd die because they'd have no time to eat, let alone actually use the services tied to the documents.
That's news to me. I maintain the Twitter client library for Go[0], and I still haven't been able to get through the process for getting access to the new streaming API (for testing the library). It requires an application stating your intended purpose and usage. I applied explaining the situation and was rejected (with a request to provide more information - I still have to resubmit that, but it's time and I just haven't gotten around to that yet).
It's possible to stream millions of tweets per day, but good luck trying to do it "within minutes of creating an account". And it's definitely not free.
For full context: I'm already a verified user on Twitter (ie, "blue check mark") and was clear in my application that I was requesting access so I could develop and test the library that other users of the Twitter API develop with. I'm not exactly complaining that they didn't approve the request initially, but if that's not sufficient to get access, it's pretty clear that they're not "giving away their data to anyone that wants it for free".
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-realtime...
The streaming API is heavily rate-limited, so you can't realistically stream "millions of tweets per day within minutes", in the context of the original article.
The new Account Activity API, which replaces Site Streams, is what I was specifically referring to. https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-beta-acc...
Again, this is the API I am talking about: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-realtime...
Yes, that's an endpoint off stream.twitter.com. It's not only limited in terms of how much relevant info you'll be able to access (in the context of the original post), but also heavily rate-limited for clients.
I agree that it's confusing that Twitter has so many different components of their API which use overlapping names, but I've looked into this extensively because, as I mentioned at the outset, I wrote the client libraries for these and still maintain them.
And how do you pull more than 1 stream, you ask? The limit of streams isn't per app, it is per authorization. If you develop an app that has sign in with Twitter and you collect auth keys for 100 people you can have 100 streams because the auth limits are per user, not per app.
I once had access to a 1% stream but thought it was a fire hose test version (and everyone would get the same 1% to avoid combining like you describe).
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-realtime...
(less one-wordily, 3500 posts or 30 days history per user, if I'm remembering right. (or something to that extent) There are a bunch of ratelimits. And if you really get into it, the "firehose", the full stream of all tweets, certainly isn't available to a normal user.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/24/cambridge...
The article discusses the Cambridge University ethics committee rejection of proposal for use of Facebook app to gather data.
Anyone have a non-scribd link to the full comments from the ethics committee members?
When the Facebook CTO recently testified before the UK Parliament, at one point they laughed at him for being so blatently insincere.
Facebook is now copying Reddit/HN up/downvotes, trial in NZ/AUS.
Then the algorithms took hold. Now most of what I tweet goes totally unnoticed. Now perhaps I am more boring now (even though I have a lot more folowers), but it doesn't seem to be the case, I think I was just as inane before.
On the other hand, if I get maybe four or five friends to retweet me, all of a sudden I have exposure and I get read, liked and retweeted a lot. This has just pushed Twitter more into the hands of bots. If I had a bot army of maybe 10 bots I would get a fair bit of exposure.
There is also a momentum thing, if I take a couple of weeks off Twitter it doesn't love me any more when I come back.
This has ruined Twitter for me.
Having them clog up my twitter timeline of people I don't _even_ follow with their tweets or the LIKES of people I do.
They distorted what a timeline was and thus the follow button essentially became ruined.
Twitter, thats not a fucking message!
These companies are too big to fail. You can't fight with cancer by slapping it on the tendrils with fines.
If you can't cut the cancer out then cut yourself from it. The effect is comparable (if we forget about or actively fight shadow profiles).
FB, Twitter and other social/media companies are for-profit and your persona is the currency they're after.
But hey, at least we'll get the perfect brand of socks/bed sheets/mattresses in the ads we're served.
The analogy adds nothing new nor interesting to the discussion. It's a content-free observation.
Not saying you complained but some people seems to use that as an excuse for downvoting every metaquestion that touches into these stupid markers of approval/appreciation or whatever it signals : )
Come on people, company that hosts insanely large free webservice 24/7 for years doesn't sell user data to the highest bidder? Do you even believe it?