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Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

rt.com

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Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

#22

Post by corin_ »

zachinglis wrote: post #2

Am I the only one not shocked or offended? I post publicly on Twitter. Anyone can do that anyway. … Unless I'm missing something.

The one possible privacy problem that I can see is that they are selling tweets that users can no longer control - if I said something a year ago that I wish I could take back ("Hi everyone, just to let you know I'm gay" or whatever), I'm now unable to delete it, or even review what it was I said, but it can still be sold and tied to me.

Still, not something I personally have an issue with, and I suspect not something most people would have an issue with.

Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

#23

Post by primigenus »

Wait, so this "article" makes a bunch of claims against Twitter based on zero authoritative links and a bunch of unsourced quotes from ... the Daily Mail?

And we're supposed to take this seriously? Come on, doesn't it take more than a bunch of unsubstantiated claims for the HN community to jump on something and just take it at face value?

Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

#24

Post by gren »

zachinglis wrote: post #2

Am I the only one not shocked or offended? I post publicly on Twitter. Anyone can do that anyway. … Unless I'm missing something.

so true. public is public. Anyone could have data mined all these twitts... But the difficult question that may rise is the "right to delete". IMO it's a hard dilemma: history VS privacy. Can someone decide to delete all its trace and destroy everything he built? On the other hand, we need to keep trace of what's happened in the past, don't you think?

Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

#26

Post by Toenex »

Once upon a time it was the consumer who was confused about what they owned. We all bought vinyl records because it meant we could hear the music we wanted to. We thought this meant we could do what we liked with the music and even though we couldn't the limitations of the technology meant the artist and record company profits never really suffered. One day digital music came along and suddenly our assumptions about what we could do with the music we owned became a serious problem for record company profits and the whole planet shook.

Now we have all become artists; our words, our emails, our tweets and posts the new music. The Twitters and the Googles are the new record companies and once more the confusion between music and vinyl has arisen.

Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

#29

Post by warp »

saurik wrote: post #12
ajanuary wrote: post #6

"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database." Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the si…

Normal people believe that information that is nearly impossibly difficult to find is as good as gone forever. (This is mostly as these same "normal people" also often don't understand that website scraping can be automated; a sad misapplication of almost-reasonable cost heuristics to a system they don't understand.) However, on Twitter there is an extra wrinkle: neither the site nor the API allow you to go back more…

If you know the id of a tweet you can still access it I believe. https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=20 still works, which allows you to construct https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 which also still works. So, it's only searches which don't go that far back.
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