Twitter Continues to Morph – With Privacy Issues
Twitter modified its privacy policy to allow it to collect users’ biometric data.
They say this is to tackle fraud and impersonation on the site.
The new privacy policy, which goes into effect on September 29th, says they will be collecting biometric data for safety, security and identification purposes. The details are kind of missing at this point. What biometric data? How are they collecting it? How long are they keeping it? And most importantly, how are the securing it.
They have said that this is limited to paid (premium) users and they will be given the option to provide a government ID and picture. Some of us do this for government and other high security websites, but this will be a first for a social media site.
The new privacy policy is also expected to all them to collect users’ employment and educational history, similar to LinkedIn, and for similar purposes. It would be to match you with employers, with whom they would share your information.
As Twitter tries to expand its desirability, they have also added a crude version of encrypted direct messages, but they have not provided any information about how they are encrypted or how secure that feature is.
And, like everyone else, they say that they may use the information they collect and also publicly available information to train their Ai models. They say this will only include public data – no DMs or private data.
While none of this raises alarm bells, it certainly does suggest that Twitter wants to collect, store, massage and manage a lot more of your personal data. What is much less clear is what controls will be in place after Twitter let go so many people.
They will also have to comply with the new EU digital services act that went into effect last month.
I think they have their work cut out for them with the entire universe watching them.
One key thing for their financial success is how to convince people to switch:
- from a free to paid platform
- from a known platform (like LinkedIn or Signal) to a platform that is known but with features that are unknown.
Stay tuned. This is, as they say, a developing story. Credit: The Hacker News
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