
Twitter also sold data access to Cambridge Analytica researcher - aestetix
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/twitter-also-sold-data-access-to-cambridge-analytica-researcher/
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testplzignore
If anyone is interested in how to buy public Twitter data, here are the
available APIs:

[http://support.gnip.com/apis/](http://support.gnip.com/apis/)

[https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/batch-
historica...](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/batch-
historical/overview) (new doc for Gnip API)

[https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/overview...](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/overview/enterprise)
(new doc for Gnip API)

~~~
stingraycharles
Yes I’m surprised all this is shocking people. Guess people knew about this,
but only now are suddenly realising the implications ?

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Facebook's public response destroyed every social media company's presumption
of good faith.

> “In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public
> tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter
> said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted
> our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about
> people who use Twitter.”

Facebook kept changing their message regarding the affected accounts, from
nothing to 87M and now possibly way more.

There's a possibility that Twitter might have sold DM information as well.
Under any other circumstance they would have some presumption of good faith,
but given what happened with Facebook there's a good chance we will hear more.

~~~
downandout
_There 's a possibility that Twitter might have sold DM information as well._

No, there’s not. They don’t sell DMs.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
I don’t know, and can’t know. So, if you don’t mind me asking, how do you know
for sure?

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Twitter said they didn't, therefore it must be true /s

~~~
koolba
Or if they did only who you messaged and when. Not the text of the message,
just “metadata”.

~~~
sudouser
...like someone important messaged Stormy Daniels...

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Talyen42
_Public_ tweets. You know, the ones everyone can see, all the time. Big
difference.

~~~
Eridrus
It's interesting how we call Facebook's data either public or private
depending on how we want to regulate it. If we're worried about user data
privacy, it's private data that CA stole. If we're worried about racial
tensions in Sri Lanka its a public forum that needs to be moderated.

Not that it's wrong, but Facebook seems to exist in this grey zone of semi-
private content which gives it both sorts of challenges and none of the usual
defences.

~~~
wil421
Facebook users expected a certain level of privacy. They didn’t realize quiz
apps would harvest a huge amount of data about their profiles. There is also
the question of what kind of data they gleaned based on being friends with
people who installed said apps.

Twitter is 100% public like a website and the expectation isn’t the same. When
you friend or unfriend someone on FB you are somewhat implying who you give
access to your feed.

~~~
fasj82
>They didn’t realize quiz apps would harvest a huge amount of data about their
profiles.

They would've known, had they read the dialog they had to accept to access
their much desired quiz.

~~~
mrguyorama
So now average users are expected to be able to interpret adversarial-y
written EULAs? If Joe Nobody should be able to disentangle a web of lawyer
jingo and ass covering from what may very well be a team of lawyers with
combined decades of experience, then why do we even have lawyers in the world?

~~~
fasj82
It's not an adversarial-y written EULA, it's something like this

[https://img.ientry.com/webpronews/article_pics/facebook-
perm...](https://img.ientry.com/webpronews/article_pics/facebook-permission-
request.jpg)

If you can't read and understand that I'm sure you can collect disability
checks from the government

~~~
JackCh
>If you can't read and understand that I'm sure you can collect disability
checks from the government

When it comes to computers there is a WIDE divide between _can 't read_ and
_doesn 't read_. I'm sure nearly every person in tech has at some point in
their life had an encounter with a non-technical user who, given an error
message that clearly states the problem, has selective blindness and doesn't
read the error message but rather just clicks 'okay' and can't figure out what
the problem was. They _could_ read the error message but have effectively been
trained not to.

Similarly facebook users _could_ read that message detailing how their privacy
is about to be violated, but have probably been trained not to care.

~~~
FridgeSeal
> but have probably been trained not to care.

I'm of the opinion that this is definitely something that has occurred and it
has been done very, very deliberately. The media and ad industry and companies
like fb work(ed) very hard to encourage people that:

* they should give up privacy in return for (carefully metered out dopamine hits) shiny things.

* they should give up more data and privacy because they've given up x much already

* They've given up all this stuff, fb/et etc already knows everything so they don't have any privacy so why bother protecting stuff _now_

* They gave up all this stuff and look, nothing bad has happened, so if you want privacy, you must be hiding something/a terrorist/a paedophile/etc.

And thus we arrive where we are now. Trying to convince people to take back
some privacy and control to un-fuck the whole situation is an uphill battle,
because those whose interests are in retaining control and lack of privacy are
very well resourced and have gone to great effort to hide negative effects
from the users and convince them of their non-existence.

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downandout
This title is misleading. By saying “Twitter _also_ sold data access...” it
implies that Facebook sold him data access. This of course is not the case.
Facebook didn’t sell him anything, he produced an app and abused the platform.

~~~
TheForumTroll
He produced an app and used the platform.

~~~
dwild
Didn't they get more than what was expected from the API? The user accepted
his profile information but they also got his friends information.

Based on Wikipedia: > Abuse is the improper usage or treatment of an entity,
often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit.

That seems like they used the API improperly to access his friends information
and got the friends information.

For sure Facebook shouldn't have given that information, but it was also clear
that information wasn't supposed to be there, that Cambridge Analytica were
aware of it and abused it.

~~~
downandout
_The user accepted his profile information but they also got his friends
information._

That was expected and agreed to behavior by all parties (users, developers,
and Facebook) at the time. I know it’s out of fashion in 2018 to acknowledge
that TOS exist and that users should have read them before agreeing to them
(or at least before complaining after the fact), but this is the reality.

The “abuse” part was that you were supposed to only access data that was
necessary for the operation of your app. Accessing friends’ profile
information to make an app that shows people who work at the same company as
you, for example, was completely acceptable and a good use case. Collecting it
for purposes unrelated to the stated purpose of the app was and is abuse. The
Obama For America app also abused the platform in this way, but on a vastly
larger scale - they pulled the entire US social graph (about 4x as many
profiles as Kogan had) after less than 1 million people actually authorized
the app and used it in all sorts of ways outside their app. This technique was
widely celebrated in the press, right up until the “wrong” candidate won.

~~~
powerapple
They got their friends' public profile, which is for public access anyway.

~~~
downandout
I actually agree with you that it's not as big of a deal as the press has made
it out to be...certainly not Congressional hearings big. But it was a
violation of the developer policies in force at the time to use data for any
purpose outside of the app.

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dumbfounder
Twitter also gives away their data to anyone that wants it for free. You can
be streaming millions of tweets per day within minutes of creating an account.

~~~
xevb3k
So what did they pay for? I’m confused, do Twitter rate limit free accounts?

~~~
testplzignore
The free API is not a full firehose. It's been many years since the full
firehose was publicly available.

~~~
spullara
It is 1% of all tweets which is about 50 tweets per second. Not the full
firehose but still very useful.

~~~
dumbfounder
It is up to 1% per stream. With 2 streams you can stream up to 2% (minus
overlaps). This is theoretical, practice isn't quite that good, but not far
off. In reality you can collect about 4-5 million tweets per day with a
stream. If you look for common terms like http,and,for,the, etc you can
collect 10's of millions per day easily with 20 or so streams. If you take the
time to develop some tech and pull hundreds of streams designed to have
minimal overlap you can pull 100+ million per day.

And how do you pull more than 1 stream, you ask? The limit of streams isn't
per app, it is per authorization. If you develop an app that has sign in with
Twitter and you collect auth keys for 100 people you can have 100 streams
because the auth limits are per user, not per app.

~~~
solarkraft
Interested dummy here: You can get a 1% stream per user authorisation (sounds
weird to me)? How do you minimize overlap?

I once had access to a 1% stream but thought it was a fire hose test version
(and everyone would get the same 1% to avoid combining like you describe).

~~~
dumbfounder
There is a sample stream which is supposed to be 1%, but then the keyword
based filter streams are also theoretically up to 1% of tweets. You can setup
streams for different words and broaden your coverage.

[https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-
realtime...](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-realtime/api-
reference/post-statuses-filter)

~~~
spullara
I could probably figure out the optimal set of keywords from all the twitter
sample hose data I have...

------
textmode
"The ethics panel member added: "Facebook is rather deceptive on this and
creates the appearance of a cosy and confidential peer group environment, as a
means of gulling users into disclosing private information that they then sell
to advertisers, but this doesn't make it right to an ethical researcher to
follow their lead.""

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/24/cambridge...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/24/cambridge-
university-rejected-facebook-study-over-deceptive-privacy-standards)

The article discusses the Cambridge University ethics committee rejection of
proposal for use of Facebook app to gather data.

Anyone have a non-scribd link to the full comments from the ethics committee
members?

When the Facebook CTO recently testified before the UK Parliament, at one
point they laughed at him for being so blatently insincere.

Facebook is now copying Reddit/HN up/downvotes, trial in NZ/AUS.

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jimnotgym
A bot of a tangent, but a year ago I loved Twitter and found it engaging. I
tweeted mildly interesting comments and sometimes mildly amusing anecdotes.

Then the algorithms took hold. Now most of what I tweet goes totally
unnoticed. Now perhaps I am more boring now (even though I have a lot more
folowers), but it doesn't seem to be the case, I think I was just as inane
before.

On the other hand, if I get maybe four or five friends to retweet me, all of a
sudden I have exposure and I get read, liked and retweeted a lot. This has
just pushed Twitter more into the hands of bots. If I had a bot army of maybe
10 bots I would get a fair bit of exposure.

There is also a momentum thing, if I take a couple of weeks off Twitter it
doesn't love me any more when I come back.

This has ruined Twitter for me.

~~~
weka
You know what ruined Twitter for me?

Having them clog up my twitter timeline of people I don't _even_ follow with
their tweets or the LIKES of people I do.

They distorted what a timeline was and thus the follow button essentially
became ruined.

~~~
arca_vorago
What really pisses me off is that now I get message notifications for "you
might have missed what X said"...

Twitter, thats not a fucking message!

~~~
534534535353
Ugh I get these all the time.

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listentojohan
I find that the whole premise of Twitter, is that the data is public.

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dymk
Inaccurate headline. There's no "also"; Facebook didn't sell that data to CA.

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greggarious
At least I thought carefully about what I tweeted since I knew it would be
public. I'm much more upset that private Facebook data, never intended to be
distributed to the public, was taken from me.

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kyleblarson
Newsflash: a for-profit company takes actions that maximize profits.

~~~
stochastic_monk
Cancer cells maximize growth. That doesn’t mean we should leave them
unregulated and let them metastasize and kill the host.

~~~
zamber
Makes you think someone should setup some rules for handling, gathering and
processing user information.

These companies are too big to fail. You can't fight with cancer by slapping
it on the tendrils with fines.

If you can't cut the cancer out then cut yourself from it. The effect is
comparable (if we forget about or actively fight shadow profiles).

FB, Twitter and other social/media companies are for-profit and your persona
is the currency they're after.

But hey, at least we'll get the perfect brand of socks/bed sheets/mattresses
in the ads we're served.

~~~
stochastic_monk
I’m with you; github is my social network. I love that their business model is
about supporting open source products but providing infrastructure for pay for
companies that need privacy. That way, I’m not a product, my work is shared
with the world, and they get to make money.

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fiatjaf
Twitter is supposed to be public.

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ComodoHacker
So we may assume he found a way to correlate users between Twitter and
Facebook.

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anoncoward778
Of course they did. Jack been a bad boy.

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AzzieElbab
What!? Did Cambridge Analytics buy that bridge in Brooklyn too?

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viyu
It's looking a lot like a (crumbling) house of cards...

~~~
viyu
Sorry I don't understand the severe downvote? I was referring to all the
"under the table" things that happened with Cambridge Analytica and similar
stories, that will surface in the next few weeks/months. Hence the crumbing
house of cards...

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I don 't understand the severe downvote?_

The analogy adds nothing new nor interesting to the discussion. It's a
content-free observation.

~~~
viyu
I see. I'm new here and I thought others might relate to what I said. Thanks
anyway.

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Yizahi
Now is the moment. The moment where you eat your tie/ hat/whatever. Yes, you,
who blindly defended Twitter that "did no harm" and "Twitter is not like FB".

Come on people, company that hosts insanely large free webservice 24/7 for
years doesn't sell user data to the highest bidder? Do you even believe it?

