Privacy row as Twitter puts all tweets on sale

PRIVACY campaigners condemned Twitter yesterday for allowing businesses to buy access to its archive of billions of tweets.

About seven million people in Britain use the social networking website to post short messages to ‘followers’.

Most believe their tweets are unavailable to those outside their chosen network after a week because that is when they can no longer be searched for on the site.

But Twitter has archived every tweet – there are about 250million a day – and has agreed a deal allowing the Uk-based company Datasift to trawl through all those posted since January 2010.

The company will use the information to help firms with marketing campaigns and target influential users.

The licensing deal is part of Twitter’s plan to generate revenue from its service, which is free to its estimated 300million users worldwide.

But the move has alarmed privacy campaigners, with the online rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation describing it as ‘creepy’.

Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, said: ‘People may consider tweets to be personal property but this deal makes clear they are not.

‘Our personal posts on social media are yet another way for advertisements to be better targeted and that’s a very lucrative industry.

‘It’s clear that if you’re not paying for a service, you are not the customer – you’re the product.’

Datasift charges companies up to £10,000 a month to analyse tweets posted each day for anything said about their products and services.

It claims to have a waiting list of up to 1,000 clients wanting to rifle through the huge Twitter archive for data that could help them target advertising and develop marketing campaigns.

Private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by Datasift.

But many users include photographs in their updates and location data from their mobile phones is also logged.

Gus Hosein, of the watchdog group Privacy International, said: ‘People have historically used Twitter to communicate with friends and networks in the belief that their tweets will quickly disappear into the ether. The fact that two years’ worth of tweets can now be mined for information and the resulting “insights” sold to businesses is a radical shift in the wrong direction.

‘Twitter has turned a social network that was meant to promote global conversation into a vast market-research enterprise with unwilling, unpaid participants.’

Justin Basini, of the data privacy company Allow, said: ‘This move shows all those throwaway tweets have suddenly become a rich new revenue stream for Twitter. It has

‘It was created to be public’

taken a stream of consciousness, analysed it, bottled it and sold it.’

But Datasift’s Tim Barker said: ‘It should come as no surprise to users that their tweets are archived – they can see every update they have ever sent on their timeline.

‘Twitter was always created to be a public social network.

‘I don’t see that this creates any new dilemmas because this information is being pushed out socially right now.

‘What Datasift will do is help com- panies get a longer view of this and a better insight.’

Access to the Twitter archive is seen as a way for companies to analyse online discussions to discover whether their products and services are viewed in a positive or negative way.

It has also been claimed financial institutions can use the information to predict future events such as mass protests – as seen during the Arab Spring – or the rise and fall of stock prices.

The row comes amid privacy concerns on other social networks.

Facebook was heavily criticised last year after it secretly introduced a facial-recognition feature to identify users in photographs.

The company was also criticised after admitting it can read the text messages of those who use the service on their mobile phones.

The Facebook application can also access a phone user’s location, contact book and internet history.

The web giant Google has also been heavily criticised for collecting data about internet users.

The French data regulator CNIL said yesterday it was ‘deeply concerned’ that Google’s new privacy policy may breach European dataprotection laws.