Twitter prohibits third parties from selling Twitter’s data to the government for “surveillance purposes.” Dataminr (5% owned by Twitter) analyzes the entire Twitter feed on a real-time basis and sends out alerts. Dataminr informs US intelligence agencies that it will no longer sell (give? provide?) the government access.
Points:
- Twitter owns your Tweets.
- Twitter monetizes its ownership of your information.
- There’s value in mining the Twitter feed for breaking issues.
- Twitter restricts the ability of its vendors to resell Twitter’s information.
- Twitter recognized that giving the government access to this information might not be viewed favorably by Twitter’s users.
What’s the over/under bet on how long Twitter is allowed to deny this to the intelligence community?