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Twitter's New Money-Making Plan: Lead Generation
jfruh writes "Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have long hoped that the information they've gathered about you will help them create better targeted and more lucrative advertising, even though advertisers never see your personal data directly. But now Twitter is upping the ante, creating a new kind of card that encourages you to give your contact information directly to people who want to sell you things. For instance, Priceline has a new card with a 'sign up and save' button that saves you 10% on a hotel — and, though it isn't made explicit, adds your Twitter handle and contact information to a Priceline mailing list. There's nothing to stop Twitter from handing this info — including your phone number, if you've registered it with the service — to salesmen."
Right... I'll keep on using adblock and ghostery.
You mean "not RoHS compliant"?
This is why parties like facebook, google, twitter, and all the other oh-so-social sites want your contact info. Of course, you knew that.
But it's actually rather deceitful to say one thing and to actually do another. And there is a fundamental problem, where information given in good faith for one purpose gets (silently!) repurposed for another. Doesn't really matter that it's because they wants moar monies, it just isn't what you signed up for. Same with "updates" to privacy policies: Same thing, regardless of what lawyers say, or even if laws exist to explicitly allow such a thing: Such repurposing is always disingenious.
It happens all the time, of course. And you can't realistically legislate against it with privacy laws, that can do no more than say "now be nice with that valuable sensitive personally identifying information, y'hear?!?". So people keep on giving false information. It isn't so much retalliation but far more a protection mechanism against the inevitable exploits of marketeering. And then there's parties with a lot of power in the market trying to force you to give far too much and actually correct information, even try to get laws passed to force you even worse.
So I say there ought to be a law allowing the use of pseudonyms wherever you like. If the government is still there for the people, that is.
Remember that once you share that data, it doesn’t belong to either you or Twitter; it belongs to the site you shared it with, and they can do pretty much whatever they want with it.
Does the US not have an equivalent of the UK's Data Protection Act or the EU's Data Protection Directive to prevent this sort of thing?
Alchemists throughout history have been trying to make gold from lead, not generating it.
There's an alchemy joke in there somewhere, and Dog knows the world needs more of those.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Not that Twitter doesn't have the right to do this, but it's not cool. This is good for big money and bad for the consumer, and that's exactly why it got posted at the Dictator's Handbook forum: it's a Dick Move.
I use Twitter begrudgingly, but this really turns me off. Maybe I'm a grumpy old bastard but I remember an Internet that wasn't just some huge info-gathering and sales pitch scheme. This new internet sucks and I wish I could turn it off but I'm addicted to it :)
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Welcome to the world of "OMG ITS FREE" social networks. Where have you been living? under a rock? Ah no wait... in a basement....
and I've tried to keep 555-1212 private for so long...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I can get 10% off wherever just by giving them my fake account details, which they can spam all they like. What's not to like about this, here?
n/t
Almost universal with "social networks". You aren't their customer.
...but you need a proper alchemist to turn your lead into gold.
I've often wondered about deleting all of my social networking messages older than [$time_frame], say 6 months.
Social networking like Twitter and Facebook is usually very time-critical: you post something relevant for the moment, but that doesn't really make sense to store for very long (unlike, say, a blog post).
After a few days your post will be so far down your contacts' streams that it will probably never be seen again by a human anyway.
So why leave it up for machines to harvest your data? Why keep posts you did when you were younger and which could possibly be embarrassing later? Why leave open the possibility that through some security failure or site policy change your data suddenly becomes public?
The problem is doing the deleting itself. Going over each post and deleting them manually is a bore.
Facebook, G+ and Twitter are obviously not going to help you automate it -- they'd rather keep your data.
What we need is plugin or site like http://www.deleteallmytweets.com/ but which has a cutoff point instead of simply deleting everything. I wonder how long such a site would survive, particularly if it became popular.
Then there's the question if you'd trust a third party with that amount of access to your profile.
Eat hot lead,not babies, Commie rat! Good as gold.
Could be Facebook's new moneymaking scheme.
Or
Could be raining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AFf0ysgNiM
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I had one thing beaten into me before I even knew how to use the internet or a simple google search. Always assume everything you put on the internet will be there forever. That was close to 15years ago, still holds true today. I am thankful that I used nicknames, fake names, etc on registering on about everything and tried hard to make it as difficult to easily identify me on the internet.
A simple search for me will result in nothing, the closest you can get to me if you narrow down my name, school, etc is you will probably pull up one of the several other people who went to the same school as me with my same name for facebook, twitter, etc. In fact I am sure of it. In fact you will pull up multiple people with that kind of search, enough to confuse anyone who doesn't know or met me on who I am (if an future employer decided to do a quick google search for example). In fact the email I give in those situations will return nothing in a search and still sounds professional.
If you really needed a throwaway number to register for something as of recently I started using google voice. To put it short I don't trust majority of these companies with my information, so they don't get it. The only ones who do are the ones who actually need it, which are generally the sites I buy things from. Everyone else will get false information as I don't like being tracked, spammed, or my information sold.
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr should be services which use personal data controlled by their own users. If we controlled our own tweets, posts, pictures, and connected them to our friends via interoperable services, then once service providers pull a fast one, we could pull up stakes and go to the next one.
Look into the prototypical Tent project https://tent.io/ for a vision of the future.
I wonder what implication this has on their partnership with Salesforce.com? Their Radian 6 login page has "in partnership with Twitter".
Background:
Salesforce.com purchased Radian 6 and Buddy Media and have combined it into what they call the Marketing Cloud.
Radian 6 listens
Buddy Media publishes
Social Media advertises
Here's the thing with the whole "10%" that is completely horseshit.
Compared to what?
In retail it's a common thing to do is to put something on "sale" and show a completely bogus original price.
Or for folks with a discount card, raise the initial price so then the "discount" they get is no better than if they bought in a different manner.
Even then - the travel industry has so many different pricing structures, add on fees, and other thing where they nickel and dime you - quote price is not the same as what you actually pay.
And then there's the small print on these cards. Read it very very carefully because there is always gotchas that cost you a lot of money.
That's a story as old as the hills
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
There weren't enough reasons to avoid social networking.
Nobody has mentioned that their two factor authentication utilizes your phone number to "secure" your account. In the name of security you'll open yourself up to more invasive, more risky spam and increase the chances of you being the target if identity theft.
Real names have power. Everyone (should) know that. So do real phone numbers, addresses etc. Avoid giving them out to those you don't trust (or at least those who don't require them).
'Cause then I could turn gold into lead.
-
would you give twitter your phone number? because you're friends with twitter? because you want to have a business relationship with twitter? because you're an idiot?
There are two types of tech companies. Those who make money by selling you a service or product you pay for directly - an IDE company, a programming company, a game company- and those who sell your personal data to companies =tech and otherwise -who are the first kind of company.
If you didn't pay for it, then you're being sold in some way as a lead . FB, Google, Huffpo, slashdot, all these companies run on some combination of eyeballs (advertising) and personal information selling.
A great man once said, "By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." His name was Bill Hicks.
I suppose you can use it in batteries, for UPS and cars etc. (I just bought a battery for the mower, it was nearly half the price of what I paid for the mower in the first place.)
But it would be better if you could generate Lithium
One of the reasons I don't fear The Omnipotent Facebook is due to their inability to serve up a single ad that is of interest to me. I've been on FB for three years, I post content and links a few times a day, both from a PC and mobile. I live in a city of two million, 'check in' here and there and have a network if probably 100 friends. Yet FB is completely incapable of serving up a single ad that I might click. Ever.
never give your real name or address
always lie, use email obfuscation services like sneakemail (or mailinator for people you don't want to talk to again), use pre-paid credit cards whenever you need to make a payment
the world we live in is such that we have to actively protect ourselves from advertisers and marketers, they will never leave us alone if we ask nicely
i am not a commodity to be "monetized" if someone wants to make money off of me they can give me a cut of the cash, not whatever "intangible" service they offer
They've already mastered the ability to generate energetic CO2 in large quanitites. It seems they're starting to move up in the world.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."