I'm not sure what un-obvious implications are there? That if you write something on the Internet in public service, people could read it? Isn't that the whole point of publishing it?
I think the implication is that people are fine when it’s used for advertising, but political campaigns is a whole different ballpark. As far as I understand, this is what makes the CA case different.
People not only were OK when Obama campaign used social networking data - they actively cheered it, including on HN and tech press, as a new and smart way to reach people. I remember reading a number of articles lauding them for it myself. Now a mundane activity of getting access to searchable public data is presented as some dark conspiracy.
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.
And, that folk, is how regulations are born, when companies abuse the people.
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 ?
Facebook's public response destroyed every social media company's presumption of good faith.
> “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.
Everyone is in agreement that public tweets are public. Twitter also has Direct Messages [1], which they represent as private:
> 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.
Because they don’t offer DMs or DM metadata for sale. This Kogan guy had no special connections at Twitter or even Facebook for that matter. He was an independent developer using off the shelf offerings of Twitter and Facebook to get what he was after. If DMs aren’t for sale (they’re not) then he didn’t get them.
They don't "sell" DMs - they just hand a DM firehose over to the feds.
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.
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.
