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Twitter Hits Back Again at Claims That Its Employees Monitor Direct Messages (techcrunch.com)
From a report on TechCrunch: Twitter is pushing back against claims made by conservative activist group Project Veritas that its employees monitor private user data, including direct messages. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Twitter representative said "we do not proactively review DMs. Period. A limited number of employees have access to such information, for legitimate work purposes, and we enforce strict access protocols for those employees." Last week, Project Veritas, which produces undercover sting operations that purportedly expose liberal biases at media companies and other organizations, posted footage that appeared to show Twitter engineers claiming that teams of employees look at users' private data. One engineer seemed to say that Twitter can hand over President Donald Trump's data, including deleted tweets and direct messages, to the Department of Justice.
Is the data on their servers? Do they have access to their own servers? Ergo, they have Trump's toots and could hand them over.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that anybody is shocked about this.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Doubling down when they've been caught red-handed is not a wining strategy in this case.
a Twitter representative said "we do not proactively review DMs. Period. A limited number of employees have access to such information, for legitimate work purposes, and we enforce strict access protocols for those employees."
Which would still be 100% true if they just sent it all to the government. Just saying.
Project Veritas doesn't make claims. They secretly film other people making claims. In this case, it is 8 or 9 Twitter employees (some of them apparently not junior flunkies) claiming that they can and do read your private messages.
See that "Preview" button?
Have they also pushed back against claims arising from video of an employee suggesting that there is politically motivated shadow banning?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Veritas means truth. In that context, it is worth keeping in mind that this is James O'Keefe who runs it, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to edit videos and take anything out of context http://www.cracked.com/article_20369_5-major-news-stories-that-forgot-to-tell-you-best-part.html https://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134525412/Segments-Of-NPR-Gotcha-Video-Taken-Out-Of-Context are two detailed examples. This is a man who literally lied about who he was as part of an attempt to bug a US Senator's phone http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/01/acorn_gotcha_man_arrested_for.html. Pretty much anything he says should be assigned zero credibility. It may well be that Twitter employees are reading direct messages routinely, or even doing so for political aims, but anything by Project Veritas should not be taken as serious evidence for such a claim.
... doesn't have any technology that compares with Twitter DM, so there's no real choice, is there?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
One engineer seemed to say that Twitter can hand over President Donald Trump's data, including deleted tweets and direct messages, to the Department of Justice.
All that says is that Twitter stores the data, not that they are reading it. I see no problem there. Also, shouldn't Trump tweets be considered official correspondence and statements from the administration (I believe the White House has even stated this at some points) and therefore be illegal for Trump to delete anyway?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Can't refute the videos he posted, could you?
So you attack the person who put them up.
I guess you failed in debating because I just called you out on your piss poor debating ability.
Looks like liberals are perfectly comfortable with censorship, reading private messages, and other crap Twitter does. Instead of attacking Twitter for being unethical, they attack the person who pointed it out with PROOF.
Good job letting us know liberals don't care about civil liberties.
Is the data on their servers? Do they have access to their own servers?
Which is yet again an example of why you should only use end-to-end encryption for personal communications.
Everything else will eventually get read.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They do expose such biases, full stop.
Some DMs are probably being watched, subject to the delivery of a National Security Letter. Some Twitter employees probably do have access to message contents in order to set this up. Although I'd imagine that they just pipe them straight to the applicable TLA that requested them most of the time.
claims made by conservative activist group Project Veritas
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. And it's your side that keeps renewing these surveillance acts anyway. So why are you surprised?
Have gnu, will travel.
There doesn't seem to be anything suspicious in the video. One guy admits to DMs being analysed by software, one guy admits to reviewing reported DMs and Tweets, one guy admits to tracking cookies, one guy admits to being able to fire (or even sue) members of staff for violating privacy rules. It's full of quick-cuts, of statements without context, with dubious edits in the middle of sentences. This is hardly a smoking gun.
Considering O'Keefe is noted fraudster and Project Veritas has been caught faking their videos, I'm surprised that ANY outlet is willing to touch him. He's a Breitbart guy, after all, and they're about as fake news as they get.
Veritas' true gift is that of gullibility. Are the people being interviewed allowing themselves to be entrapped? Or do they have to manipulate the results to have you believe it? Either way, it is useless and requires them to have the outcome of their "investigation" before it starts.
How many times are you going to repeat that lie? They've never faked a single video.
Technically speaking, if you use a decent end-to-end encryption,
e.g.: using Pidgin/Adium, using OTR encryption plugin, and using one of the libpurple plugins (you need a plugin using Facebook's JSON API, as they've shut down their XMPP Gateway)
then there isn't that much that Facebook can spy.
They can see that you *are* chatting. They can see *whom* you're chatting, and that's about it.
Given that you use OTR, they might deduce you're probably more on the nerd/geek side of things,
but it's near(*) impossible for them to guess *WHAT* your chat messages contain.
Same applies to Skype (using the SkypeWeb plugin that uses the same XML/JSON api as the new beta Linux application and as the web.skype.com website).
Same applies to Google Talk (using the buil-in XMPP plug-in, but you're limited to what's supported on Google's XMPP gateway, so no full Google Hangout feature-set, and no server-to-server XMPP/Jabber).
And if there's a useful Twitter libpurple plugin that allows private messages, you would get similar privacy too.
The main advantage is that OTR is pretty simple and mostly works out-of-the-box (as far as I know it's even pre-installed with Adium, and if both end points have OTR, it automatically kicks in).
The main disadvantage is that nowadays, most people tend to prefer web-apps instead of stand alone clients, and there getting encryption requires special plugins to work (Mailveloppe is such a plugin, to do GPG on webmail's TEXTAREA boxes).
So instead most people send clear text message over web apps, and that's something that's trivial for company to read (and therefore mine for advertising profits).
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(*): the thing is that the length of the encrypted result is partially influenced by the clear-text input.
So Facebook might guess if you're giving a short reply (e.g.: "Yes/No") or writing a long story.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And what the fuck is up with all this High School verbiage?
"Hits Back", "Claps Back", "Burns", etc. This shit is showing up all over the place in the media.
Is the national media now just a bunch of fucking High School kids and their school paper?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
O'Keefe destroys ACORN, one of the most powerful leftist organizations in American history, and it only cost him $100K.
And you call that O'Keefe losing? If that's the case, I hope O'Keefe keeps "losing" against Twitter, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo and the NYT!
"A limited number of employees have access to such information, for legitimate work purposes."
They employ Anita Sarkeesian, no I am not joking.
Seriously, the single most important thing protecting my privacy is that it isn't worth paying someone even minimum wage to monitor my boring conversations... and by the way, I have 3 Google Home Assistants and 2 Amazon Echo Shows always listening in my house, so it would be trivially easy to "bug" me.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What exactly is Twitter's business model? Do they make money off of selling advertising, like Google does? I think I created a Twitter account several years ago, but I haven't logged in since... so it's about as active as my MySpace account is.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Actually deleted message take up less storage space. But I agree, "deleting" messages in no way removes them from the old backup tapes, for several obvious reasons.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If Project Veritas is saying someone is doing something, they are doing the opposite. Their SOP is to secretly record someone then take what they say out of context or otherwise edit the recording to make them appear to say what PV wants them to say.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
This is obviously a clear contradiction to what Twitter employees said and said spontaneously.
This has some serious ramifications. This could easily be misused by Twitter and/or Twitter employees to create a portfolio that could be used to blackmail so many, many that had no idea and trusted their personal communications to Twitter. Obviously we have all been told to not put on the internet what we don't want in the public, however that is just us geeks talking to each other. As far as other people go they don't understand the consequences of failing to adhere to that.
This isn't the first series of videos that have shown Twitter's legally questionable behavior, such as the "shadow banning" videos that recently made it to the public forums. Obviously when we see a multitude of Twitter employees making these types of statements we have to lend them more credence than some official denial that obviously is a clear contradiction to what so many have said.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Provide us proof. I'd like to see it.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
don't care. Come at me bro!
But you’re a fool if you think Twitter and co. are doing any of that implicitly, when their entire shtick is public message exchange.
Twitter's entire business is built around public broadcasting of short messages (micro-blogging), so indeed, one would not expect them to care implementing secure private messaging, "direct messages" are more an after-though bolted-on.
But, all the other actors : Microsoft's Skype, Google's Talk/Hangout/whatever they'll call it in the next beta cycle. Facebook's Messenger, Facebook's WhatsApp... are all about direct message between people, about having one-to-one conversations.
Of them, only WhatsApp (and to some extent upcoming in some future Messenger) makes any attempt at end-to-end encryption (Axolotl) which is anyway happening inside an opaque blob (so you can't even audit it they are implementing it correctly, or whether they don't upload back the cleartext to Facebook).
So most of the tool commonly used for one-to-one communication nowadays offer very few guarantees that indeed the communication stays between you.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]