Twitter is making a valuable data store available to marketers for a price. Twitter, though, may find that this arrangement will cost it some goodwill on the part of its customers.
Twitter agreed to allow U.K.-based Datasift access to old Tweets—an archive of millions of messages—according to reports in British media on Wednesday. On Thursday, it was reported by the Chicago Tribune that Twitter has struck a similar agreement with the Boulder, Colorado-based Gnip Inc.
These agreements, not surprisingly, has privacy advocates in an uproar.
How It Will Be Used
Tim Barker, Datasift's marketing manager, told the BBC that the company has a waiting list of 1,000 companies to use the service it will develop with this data. The company will analyze the tweets for content, such as a positive or negative tone, and log location data and social media influence via influence monitoring service Klout.
Gnip told the Chicago Tribune that the information being collected — which involves real-time viewing — can also be used to help first responders during natural disasters or to monitor illnesses such as a flu outbreak.
Growing Privacy Concerns
Twitter’s timing in revealing the deals may have been calculated: news broke on the eve of Google’s rollout of a controversial new privacy policy, on which most of the global privacy community is focusing right now. It remains to be seen whether Google’s privacy policy will stay as is, however—not only has the EU said the policy might violate its laws, more recently Japan has made similar comments.
