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Twitter has exactly one source of users' emails/phone numbers- the user providing them.
by opencl 7y ago
Twitter has exactly one source of users' emails/phone numbers- the user providing them.
- phs318u 7y agoSorry but I’m not clear what point you’re trying to make. I may provide a phone number for the express purpose of securing my account but that doesn’t mean I’ve authorised use of that data for marketing. Users are not liable for a company’s misuse of their data (which in this instance is possibly in contravention or Twitter’s privacy policy).
- opencl 7y agoThe point I'm trying to make is that nobody authorized the use of their data for marketing. As far as I'm aware the only phone numbers they have are ones submitted for 2FA purposes, I don't see how they could have possibly accidentally mixed them up with some other source of phone numbers. If there is some sort of opt-in to use your phone number for ad targeting purposes they have done an incredibly good job of hiding it in the UI.
- phs318u 7y agoAh ok. We’re in violent agreement. I actually thought you were implying the opposite. My bad.
- itronitron 7y agoThey seem to have been allowing the use of phone numbers as a search parameter when matching result sets for their 'trusted partners', which means they are revealing user's phone numbers without technically giving the phone numbers to the trusted partners. Very poor OpSec as it allows an advertising partner to further segment its proprietary database with users' twitter profiles (how much data is available there, public or private, I don't know.) I have a hard time believing that Twitter didn't know this.
- jsnell 7y agoIf they didn’t have other data sources for this, they would have shut down the now useless ads targeting features.
- mateo411 7y agoThere are other identifiers that can be used for targeted advertising besides email addresses and phone numbers.
- egdod 7y agoTwitter could easily have dozens of sources of this data. What makes you think this is the only one?