Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
and I've tried to keep 555-1212 private for so long...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Absolutely not. Data privacy laws in the US and EU are quite different.
The closest thing we have to consumer privacy laws are HIPPA, which makes medical records confidential, and various laws and court rulings that control wiretapping, surveillance,and random searches. There is a different legal theory at work in US privacy law: US laws aim to restrict of data collection and use by the government (I am sure to get flamed for that because there are gaping holes like email), and the EU Data Protection Directive, to the best of my limited knowledge, aims to restrict data collection and use by private entities.
What Twitter has just done is perfectly legal in the US. Also, the US respects no "right to be forgotten," (which is technically infeasible anyway in my opinion), so if you quit using Twitter they get to keep using your data forever.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
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.
Could be Facebook's new moneymaking scheme.
Or
Could be raining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AFf0ysgNiM
* Carthago Delenda Est *
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.
Wouldn't that make you liable for fraud? Breaking TOS of free service is one thing, but if you are paid for your data and you provide fake then it is more serious.
On the contrary - you have no contractual relationship with the third party. A sale is just a sale. Twitter has provided information registered on your account, and you've made no guarantees with the third party about your information.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes, but did you remember to register your google voice with a cash-only prepaid cell number, and did you purchase it while in disguise and did you alter your voice if you spoke with the cashier? Have you made sure to re-purchase keep-alive minutes in other states well away from your own? I presume you've never turned the cell phone on and, if so, certainly not in your own house.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That's a story as old as the hills
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There weren't enough reasons to avoid social networking.
As suggested, I searched for Anonymous Coward and returned 4,130,000 results. You sure get around.
That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
'Cause then I could turn gold into lead.
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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.
Unless they can be construed as an intended third-party beneficiary under the contract between the primary parties.
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."