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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.
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?
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.
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.
Veritas is a master of the obvious truth hidden in plain sight. Of course folks at Twitter filter stuff...
The issue here though is by what standard they filter? Personally I don't care what Twitter does but the fools who are on the video explaining their personal bias presumably used in their filtering of Twitter feeds do make Twitter look bad in the eyes of some.
What we have here is a PR war with Veritas, which generally doesn't work out well for Veritas' targets. We are in full damage control mode by Twitter while Veritas sits back with who knows what kind of additional footage to prove anything Twitter's PR department puts out to fix this is a lie. My advice to Twitter is to shut up, make sure these folks on the video don't actually do what they claim and let it run it's course. It will pass in 2 weeks or less if you shut up.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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 ]
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 ]
Veritas is a bullshit factory, and media reporting on them as if there's any doubt to that does the public a great disservice.
If the story has legs then Twitter will sue, get the unedited footage and take them to the cleaners.
That's what usually happens with Veritas stuff, the full story comes out and it becomes clear that the video was carefully edited to give a false impression. If it wasn't they would simply post the unedited footage for all to see, and not put cuts in the middle of sentences etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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!
As soon as you starting monitoring and interfering with the messages, you are no longer a common carrier, and you become LIABLE for the content of all the messages... legally, it's better to turn a blind eye to what is being said and insure your positive deniability.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
{sarcasm}Thanks for making it easy by providing direct links to the unedited videos...{/sarcasm}
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I'm sorry, I mistakenly assumed you knew what Google was and that you could spell "Project Veritas".
https://www.projectveritas.com...
https://www.projectveritas.com...
https://www.projectveritas.com...
My bad. I'll not assume that level of competence from you again.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.