Twitter has announced that it will limit user data sharing with law enforcement.
Twitter is among the largest social media networks in the world, with a very large number of users in the US. However, like most similar companies, Twitter collects a lot of user data consisting in your tweeting habits, the location and device you tweeted from and more. The company’s policy is to not use the data for surveillance but one subsidiary firm did exactly that.
The official policy of Twitter was to prohibit the use of data meant for surveillance. However, the American Civil Liberties Union discovered a social media monitoring firm called Dataminr, which the social media company owns. Dataminr has repeatedly taken various government contracts which give local and federal law enforcement agencies access to news alerts based on user data collected by Twitter.
ACLU discovered that Dataminr managed to act contrary to Twitter’s official policy due to the fact that it worked with fusion centers and through public records requests. The firm collaborated with 77 fusion centers around the United Stated, which enabled Dataminr to search billions of both real-time and historical public tweets, which then could be shared with government agencies.
Facing mounting pressure from ACLU and its supporters as well as informed Twitter users, the company has decided to cut Dataminr’s access to those fusion centers. However, the social media monitoring firm has disputed the claim of Nicole Ozer, the technology, and civil liberties policy director at ACLU California. Dataminr stated that it never gave clients direct access to either historical tweets or bulk Twitter data, as it only uses data to issue breaking news alerts, without sharing the data with any customers.
Twitter backed Dataminr claim, maintaining that the first was gradually assigned to focus more on creating news alerts, and the remnants of a geospatial analysis program that the ACLU discovered was just an abandoned experiment.
Dataminr has further stated that it will continue to offer a limited version of their news alerts to government agencies to help them in their response to a situation. They continue to emphasize that direct firehose access to user data has never been the case in the first place.
Are you a Twitter user? If so, what do you think about this situation?
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