Twitter Caught Selling Data to Government Spies While Complaining About Surveill

It's important to note that Dataminr has unrestricted access to public tweets, whereas IIRC, scrapers are banned, and that in contradiction to the griping about "government surveillance", Dataminr pays for privileged access to X through the company’s “firehose”, and Dataminr's sole purpose is to aid law enforcement.

From The Intercept:

  “Dataminr has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter, whereby we have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available Tweets,” a representative of the surveillance company wrote to the Secret Service in a July 2023 message about the terms of the law enforcement agency’s surveillance subscription. “In addition all of Dataminr’s public sector customers today have agreed to these terms including dozens who are responsible for law enforcement whether at the local, state or federal level.” (The terms are not mentioned in the emails.)

  According to an email from the Secret Service in the same thread, the agency’s interest in Dataminr was unambiguous: “The whole point of this contract is to use the information for law enforcement purposes.”

  Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance. (Neither X nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.)

First of all, the original source is better:

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/25/elon-musk-x-dataminr-sur...

And an important missing part:

> companies like Dataminr continuously monitor public activity on social media and other internet platforms.