Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan, the app developer who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information without the users’ consent, which was later passed to a political consulting firm.
Facebook isn’t the only social network you need to worry about to protect your personal data. Twitter confirmed on Saturday to The Telegraph about its data access to the academic who later sold it to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information and later established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR). The firm, according to Twitter, was granted access to large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015.
A Twitter spokeswoman stated- “GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets for a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” they conducted an internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.
It is mentioned that it’s a common practice for Twitter to sell API access to large organizations around different news, events, and ideas for surveying opinions.
As told by Twitter, “unlike many other services, Twitter is public by its nature. People come to Twitter to speak publicly and tweets are viewable and searchable by anyone.” But email addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses are not public on Twitter unless chosen by the users.
Thus it reminds us to be safe and be careful to what we put online and shouldn’t rely on platforms like Twitter.
