24 ms·

The most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter in 2015

921 points by sgk284 4y ago

thrwaway9995 4y ago
This is a perfect example of why EU implemented GDPR. We can't trust companies to protect their users. Once money is involved, the outcome often depends on a few conscientious employees with the strength to say "NO" Som may say that
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
This feels like a fluff piece.
alexb_ 4y ago
“We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” This should be posted absolutely everywhere with this as the hook. This type of request and the admittance that companies give even more than that all the time is headline news worthy.
- philjohn 4y ago
  It's most likely that the Telco Director was lying out of his posterior, trying to scare Twitter into doing what they wanted with vague threats of "your competitor will get this money otherwise". It's called a bluff.
- rkagerer 4y ago
  Some context for those who skipped the article: The major telco said other tech companies regularly collect and sell them this type of granular data harvested from users' phones.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Maybe they were getting this from some ad networks like Taboola or Outbrain - but then those networks don't usually have enough info to really identify you. Sure, if they were giving your IP to a telCo who can map your IP to a name if you're a customer - that's identifying you. It's HIGHLY unlikely this happened at the usual suspects (FAANG).
    - DaveMebs 4y ago
      You think it is highly unlikely that Facebook/Meta is selling granular user data?
      - jsnell 4y ago
        Yes, it's incredibly unlikely. So unlikely that it's basically impossible. They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. (Think of what happened with the Cambridge Analytica case, despite Facebook's hands being pretty clean on that). No disgruntled ex-employees blew the whistle on this but did on other issue), which suggests it probably didn't happen. Selling ads is very profitable. Selling data directly risks that business for little gain. In addition to the backlash when that data selling were revealed, it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete them on ad targeting.
        SantalBlush 4y ago
        >They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. Companies typically don't admit to the public when they're engaged in unethical practices. Purdue Pharma is a good example.
        jsnell 4y ago
        Then you say nothing on the subject, or say something that's technically true but ambiguous and easy to misunderstand.
        4y ago
  - emmelaich 4y ago
    Many free wifi places will track and report movements with the wifi area. Using bluetooth in addition. Shopping malls in particular can use this to find where people congregate. Can probably be related to email addresses too, and hence shared with every other mall with same ownership as well as the company that provides the free wifi. e.g. Aruba, Meraki, ...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- anfilt 4y ago
  Agreed!
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > We get a lot more than that from other tech companies. Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? As much as I've heard about data collection and sharing by big tech, I feel like I don't see much in the way of samples or example data. Even the forced GDPR data releases I've seen haven't been extraordinarily in-depth. Surely there must be some articles out there that I'm missing?
  - sroussey 4y ago
    It’s data brokers they are talking about.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack". And some of the companies brag about their abilities. There was some surveillance company which was showing how Covid spread after spring break in Florida by gleefully posting screenshots from their tool that tracks individual phone locations.
    - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      > I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack". Do you have a link? It's always sort of discussed as if everyone knows exactly what's happening, but I'm specifically looking for links that break it down.
  - brigade 4y ago
    Sure: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca... It's simple - an app asks for background location permissions, then uploads all the datapoints and timestamps the OS gives them to their servers, which is then resold with "anonymization" that just replaces any personal information with an impersonal unique identifier. That's the reason Apple/Google have clamped down so hard on location permissions since then. But even a degraded dataset is still valuable - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-tour-how-cops-can-browse-your-location-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-to...
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  You think it's true taht they get a lot more than that from "other tech companies"? (who is that? Facebook? Tik-tok?) (As an aside, it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details, but I'm glad he did)
  - modriano 4y ago
    I assume most free weather app companies make money nearly exclusively by selling user location data.
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    Your (U.S.A.) cell network provider sells your location. No need for apps!
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      In this case wasn't it was a cell network provider wanting the info from twitter? why'd they want it if they already have it?
      - jagged-chisel 4y ago
        Probably to correlate Twitter user names with telco customers.
        HWR_14 4y ago
        Oh, wow. I didn't even think the request included Twitter handles.
      - shiftpgdn 4y ago
        They (the telcos) only have stats on their customers. Twitter has it for anyone running twitter. Further, twitters location data is likely more accurate than the telco due to positioning from stuff like wifi names, local gps, etc.
  - 4y ago
- languageserver 4y ago
  I do not trust this story. Seems way too absurd to happen in the 2010's. Literally just some guy (tm) on Twitter saying it
  - jabyess 4y ago
    which part seems unbelievable to you?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Healthy dose of mistrust is warranted. Still, would it really shock if it were true? In my eyes, it would only confirm what I already know.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Why wouldn’t you believe this was happening? Facebook bought a VPN provider with the explicit purpose of spying on its users and both Facebook and Google convinced users to use what was suppose to be an internal Enterprise Certificate to track users until Apple threaten to cancel the certificate. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googles-internal-apps-on-ios-devices-report-says/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googl... But Twitter had been tracking apps installed on a users iPhone until Apple restricted access to the API that they used. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the-apps-you-download/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the... The purpose of the API was for one app to send messages to another app. But it could be used to tell if an app was installed.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    2015 to be precise, which is fairly late in the game. I was at a conference a few years prior to that and some guy was bragging about all the stuff they can find out about people based on their data this and data that. There is some obsession amongst a subset of techies with knowing everything, and that extends to the daily minutiae of the lives of others.
  - 4y ago
- kkfx 4y ago
  I suggest you to think a bit about the context: - the location logs would be collected by a simple application, witch imply the phone/phone OS itself can do that; - they do refuse, Legal teams do not, but nothing state they can't satisfy the request TECHNICALLY. In other words when people tend to disagree with my consideration of smartphone as macro-spy devices bought and kept up by those who get spied as opposite of classic spying gears should think about not only that, but what they do with their (well, not really their, since they are just formal but powerless owners) phones, things like pay taxes, act on their banks accounts, pre-heat/cool their cars etc. Because such activities have a FAR bigger impact than mere position logs.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  What I'm confused by is why the telco needs twitter to get that info. I work for a data warehousing/sql consultancy and our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order to comply with subpoenas. They already have all the data about where every one of their users has been.
  - chrononaut 4y ago
    > our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order to comply with subpoenas. Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't understand the intersection of why telco's are involved in serving subpoenas and the need to know the physical location of users. Are you referring to a log of networks / DHCP leases their customers were using at any given time?
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      Not serving subpoenas, responding to them. Police subpoena stuff like "everyone who was within x feet of this phone number or location between these times" and the telcos can't just say "we don't keep that data."
      - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
        …why not? Is there a federal law compelling then to record and store precise location data indefinitely?
        colinmhayes 4y ago
        I'm not sure if it's a legal requirement or they just don't want to upset law enforcement. I guess maybe they're just keeping the data for other reasons and then law enforcement is jumping on that. All I know is they're using our data warehouse and having me write queries that answer those subpoenas when they come in. Well I know that in the UK it is a legal requirement, but not sure about the US.
      - novok 4y ago
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  This is why I never use native apps on my phone. The experience sucks but I muddle through using the web for reading Twitter, reddit, etc. I am constantly, constantly bombarded with "this looks better in the app! please just run our app!!" as I browse. Still I refuse--with the web I at least know they can't harvest information about everything I'm doing. There are still some privacy concerns of course but it's much better to have the web as a firewall of sorts.
  - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    It's gross because that's exactly why they ask you to install. "This looks better in the app" because they sabotage the web experience so they can do this very thing.
  - subsubzero 4y ago
    same, my Wife who has 2-3 dozen apps is asking me why do you not use apps?(I have <10 apps on my phone) and I said I do not trust my data for one second with alot of these unscrupulous apps. I have a strong bias towards privacy - caveat emptor.
  - samwillis 4y ago
    Twitter and (old)reddit are better as mobile websites in every way. We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form a queue of things to read. Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that. They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at social media companies, they want to prevent their users leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net negative feedback loop for user satisfaction. Social media apps have no multitasking features (at least last time I used them). It's absurd. I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three years. Will never install the app again. (Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React Native is an attempt to distract developers from the advantages of a WebView based app development process that would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs into the app stores as a distribution channel)
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect other tech companies were claiming that they would have this granularity eventually but never actually delivered. One of the things that happens at these (and the fact that he didn't "hear this" until on site) is that Sales promises everything with a flashy powerpoint, and then what is actually delivered is a "if someone tweets in the Verizon store and uses Verizon in the tweet, you can put an ad on that".
  - aorloff 4y ago
    No, there are dozens of companies that have this data.
    - hahaxdxd123 4y ago
      Can you cite?
- bewaretheirs 4y ago
  I would have thought that a mobile telco could generate this data already just from what they need to route data (and voice calls) to each phone, at least to a somewhat coarse level, without needing to have apps upload this.
  - sp332 4y ago
    Yeah but they actually got in trouble for selling that so many times they have backed off. https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_report/?td=keepreading https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_...
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    Yeah, they have to be able to. Something about this story just doesn't add up unless this is explained.
    - f2000 4y ago
      They were after data for other carriers and/or more enriched data than they could easily collect. They could use this data for their own marketing and/or network planning. e.g. “We have the least share in market M where some significant proportion of all cellular users , based on twitter data, love NASCAR and spend relatively a lot of time on their phones at racetracks and Walmart. Lets increase capex around race tracks, do a promo with NASCAR and Walmart, and buy some appropriate ads.”
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  What angers me the most about this, is this type of topic is exactly what should be taught in a required class on ethics for engineering degrees, but is completely missing.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Yes it should be semester 1 in every single CS and SE course. Sadly, there are very few resources; textbooks and professors qualified in software engineering and ethics, and the adjacent political, social and economic realms to fill this. I'm really, honestly doing my best with this problem. The subject area is massive. The issues are horrendously complex. The targets keep moving (each day we seem to set a new bar for what shitfuckery is acceptable). Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily hard (and it makes it worse that I am an opinionated bastard) HN remains one of my best resources for "pragmatic" ethics, and so I thank you all.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily hard Ethics and personal values are the same thing. It would be impossible to write a book on Ethics for [any audience] that didn't consist entirely of personal values. Similarly, since ethics are necessarily subjective, it is impossible to write about ethics in a non-prescriptive way.
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        There's actually an entire chapter on that subject; the difference between morals, ethics, norms, laws and best practices, throughout history and in "post-modern relativist" times. You'll either love it or hate it, depending on how open your mind is.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > the difference between morals, ethics That one's especially easy. They are exactly the same thing; mos is the Latin word, and ethos is the Greek one.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Even if we assume that the OP is telling exactly what happened rather than exaggerating (stories do tend to grow in the telling over 8 years), we don't actually know that this alleged data selling happened. All he knows is that somebody at a telco with an interest in getting Twitter's data claimed that the telco got more data from other companies. What other companies? No details. What data? No details. Was the guy from the telco telling the truth, or lying since that furthered their agenda? We have no way of judging that, and neither did the OP. Spamming this submission with that hook (rather than the parts that the OP had actual direct knowledge of) is basically just spreading misinformation.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    It's also, at best, a claim made by a (presumably non-technical) employee of one of these Big Tech companies' clients. It's entirely possible that they were able to benefit from the data that Google, Facebook, whatever collects while not having direct access to it in any form.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  Name and shame them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- legohead 4y ago
  He could have been bluffing with that statement. If he already gets it, what does he need twitter for?
- rbetts 4y ago
  It's hearsay said by an antagonist during a negotiation. This quote isn't by itself trustworthy enough to be news.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” > This should be posted absolutely everywhere with this as the hook. This type of request and the admittance that companies give even more than that all the time is headline news worthy. It's pretty well know, but it should be even more well known. IIRC, what's left of foursquare basically does that, lots of "free" apps do it (like weather, calculators, flashlights, etc.). It's the whole reason the "only allow location access when using the app," was invented.
- YeBanKo 4y ago
  Sale of data should be opt-in, not opt-out. Companies will find a way to go around this and we’ll have to catch up again, but it would be a good next step.
- FrontierPsych 4y ago
  Carry your mobile phone in a faraday cage/bag. https://www.amazon.com/faraday-bag/s?k=faraday+bag https://www.amazon.com/faraday-bag/s?k=faraday+bag
mdaniel 4y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html
pixl97 4y ago
https://nitter.net/stevekrenzel/status/1589700721121058817 https://nitter.net/stevekrenzel/status/1589700721121058817 If you're not interested in visiting twitter directly.
- imron 4y ago
  Nitter is best Twitter.
  - appel 4y ago
    FWIW, you can use an extension like Redirector (https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/) to automatically redirect any Twitter URL to Nitter with the following: Redirect: https://twitter.com/\* to: https://nitter.net/$1 Hint: Twitter to Nitter Example: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 Applies to: Main window (address bar) I'm also using this for 'fixing' referral URLs but that's another story.
- beeboop 4y ago
  This is about on par with people ordering "Kiev Mules" instead of "Moscow Mules"
  - lost_tourist 4y ago
    Not really, it's more like homemade mac and cheese vs kraft mac and cheese; in the former you get to control the ingredients
  - mmmmmbop 4y ago
    You have a typo there. It's called Kyiv.
    - beeboop 4y ago
      Both spellings are accepted.
itronitron 4y ago
I also assume that Elon and his backers will do far worse things with Twitter users' data.
- hersko 4y ago
  Why?
  - netsharc 4y ago
    I'm not the grandparent poster, but maybe the answer is "there are 44 billion reasons and 1 impulsive guy at the helm"...
  - itronitron 4y ago
    because they can
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    Because to some, myself included, Elon has not shown to have any ethical guidance other than self enrichment. Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology doesn't seem like they'd have too much problem selling people out.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      I would make this argument for all of silicon valley. We know for a fact Google and Facebook sell people out, actively, right now. We also know pre-Musk Twitter had a host of internal issues and questionable ethics.
    - EricE 4y ago
      >Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology Your referring to Twitter pre Musk, and not Musk, right?
    - memish 4y ago
      https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
nrmitchi 4y ago
This really isn't a just for Twitter; this is the danger of selling any application with a large install-base. Doesn't really matter if it's a social network app, borderline-useless mobile app, Facebook App (I'm looking at you, Cambridge Analytica), chrome extension, or pypi/npm module, all of these things are capable of collecting extremely fine-grained user detail, and selling it off. It doesn't matter if the current owners don't/won't do it, there is essentially nothing that prevents someone else from buying it up, and doing nefarious things with the existing install base. And as far as "Terms of Service" go, there is essentially nothing to prevent a future owner from updating the Terms of Service, and then doing the above.
woojoo666 4y ago
> As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it. > I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. When has Elon been against user privacy? Also, isn't Elon good friends with Jack? I feel like they would see eye to eye with this. In fact Elon seems like the type that would try to champion emerging fads like crypto, differential privacy, and zero knowledge proofs. Harvesting data is boring and easy.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Elon has a significantly stronger profit motive, given his high purchase price and Twitter’s otherwise tanking advertising sales.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    And yet his first move after purchase is to charge for the blue check service. Bringing non-data mined revenue to Twitter is one of the keys for aligning the company with respecting privacy. Either way, stories like this are one reason you should avoid social media apps altogether and never allow an app to access location data, especially not while in use.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Trying to get more users to pay for the service (while notably not reducing their ad profile or how many ads they see) strengthens my point: he’s clearly trying to maximize the value of an unwise purchase, and leveraging every saleable form of personal information is an obvious next step.
      - chrisco255 4y ago
        Everything published on Twitter except for DMs is open to the whole internet to crawl. It is a public platform. I think it's fair game to serve you ads about Doritos if you are tweeting about potato chips and following Frito Lays. Location based, privately identifiable, data is a bridge too far for me. But we also know for a fact other social media apps already do this if Twitter's app does not already do this currently. The hype about Twitter being an unwise purchase is just noise from the peanut gallery. You should take such noise with a grain of salt. Twitter was always under pressure to maximize value to shareholders. Same with every other tech company. Different companies sometimes make different trade-offs. I fail to see why Musk is somehow going to do any worse than what we've seen from social media companies over the past 15 years. But I do think there's a reasonable chance he'll do better.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
He won the battle (pyrrhic-ly) but not the war. Fine grained location is commonly bought and sold in the USA: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v34a/fog-reveal-local-cops-phone-location-data-manual https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v34a/fog-reveal-local-cops...
- scarface74 4y ago
  We need more government to protect involved in tech to protect our privacy! Oh wait, it’s the government we need to be protected from.
  - usednet 4y ago
    Digital privacy is an illusion at this point. Our chips are backdoored, our fiber backbones are tapped, our VPNs are compromised, our forums are honeypots. I think the benefits of increased government regulation on digital privacy outweigh the potential abuses at this point. What more is there for the government to see? They have everything and more.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So you want to give the same government who is abusing power even more power?
      - usednet 4y ago
        Its not a question of abuse of power anymore. The PATRIOT Act has already given them unlimited power with no checks. Might as well have them use some of their power for something that benefits consumers.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Wouldn’t it make more sense to start trying to take away power from the government then?
ploum 4y ago
For one story like this which emerges because the engineer refused, how many stories we will never heard about because it was simply done? As software engineers, we are just like medical experts talking about the toxicity of cigarettes while ourselves buying cigarettes and distributing them to our own children.
- imiric 4y ago
  > As software engineers, we are just like medical experts talking about the toxicity of cigarettes while ourselves buying cigarettes and distributing them to our own children. It's even worse than that. Most of the people working in adtech are actually producing cigarettes, and laughing all the way to the bank. Many of them are on this very site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
  - moolcool 4y ago
    AdTech (in it's current state at least) is morally indefensible
stewx 4y ago
The Tim Hortons mobile app in Canada did this very thing: monitoring your GPS location 24/7, and logging special events when you entered a competitor's store, like Starbucks. https://www.reuters.com/technology/investigation-finds-tim-hortons-app-violated-privacy-laws-says-canadian-2022-06-01/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/investigation-finds-tim-h...
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  The proposed settlement is absolutely insulting too. A coffee and donut: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-hortons-app-1.6536175 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-hortons-app-1.6536175
  - wilg 4y ago
    Should at least have been a Starbucks coffee
    - muddi900 4y ago
      And a Krispy Kreme or a Dunkin. Tim Horton's donuts suck donkey nards
- chasd00 4y ago
  correct me if i'm wrong but won't your phone prompt you to explicitly allow access to a service when the app requests it? When the Tim Hortons app asks to use your location can't you Just Say No? ...or at most allow once.
  - flutas 4y ago
    > When the Tim Hortons app asks to use your location can't you Just Say No? ...or at most allow once. Let us know when you're in the drive through! Just say yes to this prompt. [location prompt] === I've actually been curious about this for a bit, I need to dig in to some apps to see what they're doing. I've noticed, for example, the Chick-Fil-A app does that prompt, and then continues monitoring your location even after you've gotten your order and aren't near the restaurant anymore.
AceJohnny2 4y ago
> And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto. This is something I've been repeating to some of my younger colleagues. Engineers aren't really fungible resources, to the extent that these projects require. Ask any manager how easy it is to swap "allocated resources", and they'll probably sigh heavily. People are afraid that if they don't follow their manager's every request, they will be fired. But remember that hiring is hard, and managers are loath to fire someone they've already spent so much effort finding, hiring, and onboarding. Finding someone else to do it can take weeks, months, or longer! Which in many cases risks killing the project altogether. Even if you're at the bottom of the chain, as the person who does the actual implementation, you have a lot of power on what gets prioritized. See also the oft-circulated OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabotage.html http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabota...
- piva00 4y ago
  I have successfully implemented pocket vetoing at the most immoral company I worked for, it was a brief stint (caused by the moral issues) where I could play around not delivering all the features management wanted to gouge their customers by playing with other priorities. You don't need to do it, you don't even have to explicitly say no, you can just always find (or create) work that's more important to do than breaking your own morals. The worse that can happen is someone else gets the hot potato.
- antognini 4y ago
  Reminds me a little of the story [1] about how in 2005 the execs at Google had a meeting to figure out what to call "Satellite View" in Google Maps. One faction did not like the name "Satellite View" because it was technically incorrect as many of the images had been taken from airplanes, not satellites. But the proposed alternatives like "Aerial photography" all sounded awkward. Right before the meeting ended Sergey Brin decided it would be called "Bird Mode." Later on when the engineering team was actually implementing it they thought Bird Mode sounded dumb and just called it Satellite View. And so it has been ever since. [1]: https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569 https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569
galkk 4y ago
I'm not Musk fanboy, but the leap in the end to put the dirt on him is outrageous ("I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data."). Let me try to summarize what author actually said in the end: "I left, I sent email to then CEO of twitter and PER MY KNOWLEDGE the project was canned, I don't know if it actually was. But new guy still could do worse things". If you're so moral, why not blow whistle to public when you left previously, and not write unsubstantiated claims about new owner now.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  Ex-Twitter employees blowing the whistle on the highly dodgy stuff they were asked to do during The Time when Twitter Was The Best Twitter and somehow attributing it to The Dark Now-Times Of Current Twitter is very 2022.
  - bfgoodrich 4y ago
- cauthon 4y ago
  I don’t perceive the original author to be “putting the dirt” on Musk. It is likely that the third-party partners who were interested in collecting that data remain interested. The leadership who formerly blocked access to that data has left, and the new ownership finds himself in need of new revenue streams. It seems like a reasonable time to call attention to the issue, though I agree with others in the thread that it should be a larger story not specific to a single platform.
  - nomel 4y ago
    Calling attention to a problem is great. Assuming the worst path from someone is very different than that, and not so great.
- bogwog 4y ago
  > If you're so moral, why not blow whistle to public when you left previously, and not write unsubstantiated claims about new owner now. The first tweet in that thread: > With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter. IMO this guy demonstrated an incredible amount of personal integrity here. He likely could have made a lot of money by building this out, but decided not to because he knew it was wrong. This is why we need more laws and government regulation: people that do the right thing like this are very rare. Typical incentive structures don't optimize for these types of people, so legal ones need to exist to limit the damage that the inevitable bad apples will do.
pessimizer 4y ago
> I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. I notice here the casual dismissal of actual, observed harm for the sake of fantasies of future harm. I wish that the similar casual dismissal of government censorship laundered through private media monopolies came with some similar sort of fear of how President Trump or President DeSantis will handle their brand-new tools in a couple of years. That being said, Democrats saw what Bush did with his unchecked executive powers, and didn't roll a thing back when they later had the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Instead, they continued doing politics by executive order, and cemented AUMF as a declaration of a permanent state of emergency.
hayst4ck 4y ago
All individuals are incentivized to do the wrong thing. CEO's are incentivized to sell data to make money. Engineers are incentivized to create bad software via making the people who pay them happier. Users are incentivized to give up their data in exchange for a free service. Politicians are incentivized by political donations and getting information they aren't constitutionally privileged to get. Doing the ethical thing requires making less money (or losing money) for nearly all parties involved. Doing the right thing requires sacrifice. In a happy world, the CEO has long term vision and sees the long term cost of loss of trust. The engineers see the ethical problem or betraying their peers and use their pocket veto to do the right thing. The user should be willing to pay a reasonable cost to receive the service they use. Politicians should see that the individual incentives harm the whole and create regulations that disincentivize the poor behavior. Non-rhetorically: How do we ensure as a society that we live in the latter, and not the former?
- louthy 4y ago
  That’s what governments and laws are for. Expecting companies to work for the greater good is naive at best; and we shouldn’t really get upset when they don’t. That’s not their motivation, as you’ve highlighted. Strong legislation and independent legislators are what’s needed
  - kodyo 4y ago
    You appear to have a misunderstanding about the nature of government, sir.
    - Tryk 4y ago
      Pray tell, what is the nature of government?
      - kodyo 4y ago
        They're run by thieves and murderers.
  - 4y ago
timr 4y ago
> I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. The story is interesting, but this line is petty. It's also more than a bit ironic, given that the OP just spent N tweets describing how the previous management wasn't exactly setting high ethical bars. The worst aspect of "Twitter culture" is the tendency -- illustrated here, perfectly -- to slander people, just to make the mob shake their pitchforks harder. I sincerely hope Musk finds a way to fix that.
- giarc 4y ago
  "I sincerely hope Musk finds a way to fix that." He's currently slandering people on the daily, so I doubt it.
  - memish 4y ago
    > He's currently slandering people on the daily, so I doubt it. Examples? If it's daily, you should be able to quickly point to 3 from the past 3 days.
    - EFreethought 4y ago
      He posted a conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack almost immediately after it happened. That's a month supply of being a jerk right there.
      - memish 4y ago
        That's only one example and he deleted it within hours.
    - giarc 4y ago
      Amplifying a false story about Paul Pelosi should be enough but he's also called Kathy Griffin a bad comedian after banning her for changing her name.
      - 4y ago
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
This made me cringe: > Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS. Almost as if was watching an episode of some dystopian show happening somewhere in the future. It's sad to learn it's already happened.
- paulcole 4y ago
  There’s a reason that it’s called the legal department and not the moral department. They’re paid for legal advice. What’s “right” and “wrong” only sometimes factors into that advice.
jl2718 4y ago
> …Elon will do far worse things… Non-sequitur. The story is about middle management doing evil things for almost no incentive except a small pat on the back for padding a short-term revenue number, while the actual owner-leader who benefits the most shuts it down.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  The people that LARP-ed as the resistance need a new enemy. Even today's elections are billed as threatening democracy if the plebs have the audacity to vote for the wrong people. I don't think this is opinion that should be taken seriously - just tribal signaling. And Elon Must is something even worse than a heretic - he is apostate. So he is obviously the worst/best person in the world for people that have no better things to do than to be passionate about the culture war that is going on.
ed25519FUUU 4y ago
This is just one reason why I always prefer to use the website rather than an app. If I use the website I'm browsing on my terms: adblocking enabled, no location data, a lot less surface area for tracking. When you use the app then you're browsing on their terms: geolocation, tracking, ads, everything.
streblo 4y ago
> Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. > Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. I worked at Twitter at the same time, and while the company definitely was going through a rough patch at that time, it was absolutely not anywhere close to 'shutting down' or 'on its death bed' financially.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Yeah this kind of thing is easily verifiable.. Per page 41 in their 2016 annual report, the balance of cash + short term equivalents went from $3.6 billion in 2014 to $3.5 billion in 2015 to $3.7 billion in 2016. Their annual GAAP loss was roughly 1/7th of that. Not the most profitable company in the world, but they had plenty of cash and hand and no real trouble fundraising.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  Never let facts derail a good story.
quadcore 4y ago
It's not explicitly said so I gota ask: it's illegal (in the U.S.) right?
- wmf 4y ago
  No, sadly this is legal and most apps are doing it. Heck, the cellular carriers are directly selling your location regardless of what apps you use.
- npteljes 4y ago
  US entities sell data left and right, legally. Freakin DMV is selling personal data[0]. Internet providers are selling browsing data[1]. Absolutely nothing illegal about the Twitter request. [0] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-driver-data/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-selling-your-location-data https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...
MockObject 4y ago
What would a Telco do to me with such data? Anything that I would care about?
xrd 4y ago
Anyone using social media services need to pay attention to this story. When the profit margins shift ever so slightly, or say massively like with the Apple changes, then these companies will take meetings with executives like this Telco who wanted data on when people are going into their competitors stores. Unbelievable, or should I say, totally believable and totally expected.
icare_1er 4y ago
Sounds like a good story for Darknet Diaries....
mobileexpert 4y ago
There are tons of data brokers that get near real time user level location data from mobile apps (usually not from ‘name brand’ apps but from the long tail) and then sell this as aggregated data products to others: eg https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/monthly-patterns https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/monthly-patterns .
ForHackernews 4y ago
> Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved them and made them relevant again So in the Good Timeline there's no Twitter _and_ no President Trump?
wintermutestwin 4y ago
- npteljes 4y ago
  Exposure. Why medium over hosting it yourself? Same answer. As to why the people congregated on Twitter in the first place? Now that I don't know.
rayiner 4y ago
Intriguing: > I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing. > The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” If they have so much data on us, why is the ad targeting so laughably bad? Facebook has recently been pushing me to watch Hocus Pocus 2. -_-
skizm 4y ago
The worst part of these types of stories is every time I tell my non-tech friends and family about this stuff, the vast majority respond with: “so what?” They genuinely do not care about their own privacy from companies. Then they bash Facebook or who ever else is in the news most recently about misusing data and can’t connect the dots. It really feels like a losing battle of trying to save people from themselves. :(
jiveturkey 4y ago
> With Twitter's _change in ownership_ last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter. Generally not true/safe. Any NDA still in effect would be transferred to the new owner. If the author genuinely believes this, they may want to delete this tweet asap. If it's just rhetorical, well ok then.
fleddr 4y ago
This revelation just shows that doing the right thing depends on the accidental and rare "good guy" to hold their foot down. It's not something we can rely on. The Elon Musk burn in that sense is distracting. He hasn't done anything in this direction yet. He very well may, but he hasn't. So it's a false accusation/speculation. Counter to that, there is the fact that Twitter's legal and sales departments (pre-Musk) were totally cool with sending fine-grained location data to whoever pays for it. Controversy should focus on actual events, not imaginary ones. As such, old Twitter has some explaining to do and it's worrying that no actual Telco is named. Finally, a quote like "other tech companies give us far more" should launch a swarm of journalists to dig as deep as possible.
miiiiiike 4y ago
Finally, someone who quit. So many of these stories are from someone who built the thing, profited, left, and then took up a new chapter of their career talking about how everything they did at <BAD COMPANY> was bad and that they should now receive funding, back pats, and NPR airtime for their new <GOOD COMPANY>. My question is always: "So, are you going to give the money back?" There really is a middle ground between just following orders and dedicating your life to sabotaging a company from the inside because someone there once thought about doing something that didn't 100% align with your personal mission. You can refuse and you can quit. More people need to read books on engineering ethics.
thibautg 4y ago
What scares me is that Elon Musk has now technically access to all the logs and even to the DMs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SilverBirch 4y ago
Very true about the pocket veto, and I've said this to my team before - I can give advice, I can argue for my values, but my lever as a manager is hire or fire. I don't have time to do the implementation, and the person doing the implementation realistically is going to decide the inplementation. I can influence, but really, they decide.
callamdelaney 4y ago
Why does he assume Elon will do far worse with the data? The anti-Elon narrative is pretty dull and so far generally unsubstantiated.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  He's a Them instead of an Us, and is therefore evil and motivated by ill intent.
- Kye 4y ago
  Desperate people do desperate things. He's staring down the barrel of a $1B/year debt service and a collapsing reputation. That reputation is how he convinces investors to keep giving him money while timelines keep getting pushed years into the future. He's the guy who landed two rockets on live TV (oversimplified, but you know reality distortion fields). If he becomes the guy who fumbled Twitter after playing up how good he would be for it, it's over. This is how "Do No Evil" Google started mining data and buying up the nascent AdTech industry. They weren't mustache-twirling villains, they were desperate to save the company with antsy investors breathing down their necks. They had to do something to justify themselves to investors post-.com bust, and all that data was right there.
  - callamdelaney 4y ago
    This is a stretch in my opinion. The biggest issue in this guys story was advertiser money. Musk agrees, hence why he's diversifying income by charging for the tick. Weird that advertisers cut their money immediately.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto. Here's a comment I made a month ago, or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33001139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33001139 I was asked to do an unethical thing, just after being promoted. I declined, but everything turned out OK.
RajT88 4y ago
This take of "Elon will do a lot worse things with the data" is my own personal take on WHY Musk bought Twitter. He's of a libertarian bent, so it could well be a real part of the story that he wants more free speech, and less censorship of similar folks. However, I do believe he is playing that up to try and avoid any discussion of the monumental tranche of data he is sitting on top of and the potential value of it. I recall in the early days, the entire Twitter database was made available to researchers, who found they could predict overall market movement (up, down, some basic idea how much) about 3 days ahead of time by looking at sentiment trends. All of that is worth "Take over the World" kind of money, where as the free speech stuff is, well. Worth percentage points at best.
godmode2019 4y ago
I think this post buried the lead a little bit. "All other social media companies give us more than is" An app logging signal strength can pin point your location, which is then commonly sold to companies such as telcos as alleged in this story. Owning a phone without GPS turned on, any app can track and sell your every movement without violation of any T&C or local laws. That is beyond distressing.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
The author was asked to work on several unethical projects while at Twitter. As stated in the title, this is only "the most" unethical one. Did he refuse to fulfil the other requests.
xnx 4y ago
Good reminder that while Google gets a lot of negative privacy attention it is telcos, ISPs, and lesser-known apps that are the most deplorable actors data collection and selling.
sneak 4y ago
> One of the first areas I worked on was improving the way our mobile apps uploaded logs. Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs everything* users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments.* A reminder: use the mobile web version of any services you use, not the app, and use NextDNS to block all the tracker hosts at DNS level.
toofy 4y ago
> As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it. I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. yeah, this is a major concern of mine now. while a few months ago i had some minor concerns with elon discussing taking it over, his behavior since this started has elevated those concerns to an absolute red alert level. the kind of data he has access to is terrifying. i’m predicting whatever it is will make the facebook/cambridge analytica thing look tame in comparison.
stephen_g 4y ago
"We get a lot more than that from other tech companies." And hence why almost every app on my phone has location access 'never' and only the ones that really need it have it 'while using app'. Of course, I never even got the Twitter app, I've always just used it in Safari on my phone.
victor9000 4y ago
> We get a lot more than that from other tech companies This is why I don't install apps
sidcool 4y ago
Genuinely curious. Why and how would Twitter have access to all this customer data?
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Why: to help advertisers target people How #1: You have a smartphone, your smartphone has GPS, you have Twitter installed in your smartphone. Twitter requests your location, you approve that request = done How #2: You have a smartphone, your smartphone has WiFi enabled. Your WiFi interface can see certain WiFi SSIDs. A Google car wardrived through your neighborhood saving all SSIDs of every Wifi and where they were last seen. Now location services has your location even with GPS disabled.
  - sidcool 4y ago
    Oh. Twitter app has so many permissions? What if I use twitter in a web browser?
pyuser583 4y ago
How can I protect against this while still using Twitter? Use a VPN? Don’t give Twitter access to location?
- nunez 4y ago
  don't use official apps, and if that is not possible, use an ad blocker at the dns level, and give the app as little permissions as you can (be extra wary of giving it bluetooth, mic, location, and photos)
pyuser583 4y ago
Makes me wonder how much “dump trucks” of money is.
cryptonector 4y ago
> We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want. Sales. Sales at Twitter sells user data to Twitter's customers [who aren't necessarily even advertisers]. Got it.
rurban 4y ago
> I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing. > The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” First thing today I did, was uninstalling the Twitter app. Even if it's not in (who knows). Totally forgot about the big apps deals with the global spying business.
tomcam 4y ago
> Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs everything users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments. Maybe other things too
Kye 4y ago
I wonder how many stories like this are waiting to come out from the 2010s, the era that turned the internet into a centralized hellscape that ran on ads and creepy data collection.
V__ 4y ago
For as much shit as GDPR gets (sometimes rightfully so), I'm really glad there is at least some data protection in the EU. The free-for-all that is hiding stuff in the TOS is atrocious and terrifying. Twitter and Facebook being each in control of one person at the top, each with "eccentric" tendencies, makes this situation really dystopian.
throwaway67743 4y ago
I'm confused by the bit that says it's ok now??? If an NDA applied before the buyout it still applies, so why mention it now? Attention? Confusion about how employee contracts and NDAs apply? Not entirely true? Can't figure out which from the thread
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
This reminded me to uninstall the Twitter app, just in case they build in new shenanigans like these now.
bayindirh 4y ago
I don't know what's more disturbing. The request, Legal's response, or the people responding to the thread and finding none of this is unethical. Seems like we have lost something along the way.

921 points by sgk284 4y ago

This is a perfect example of why EU implemented GDPR. We can't trust companies to protect their users. Once money is involved, the outcome often depends on a few conscientious employees with the strength to say "NO" Som may say that

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

This feels like a fluff piece.

alexb_ 4y ago

“We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” This should be posted absolutely everywhere with this as the hook. This type of request and the admittance that companies give even more than that all the time is headline news worthy.

philjohn 4y ago
It's most likely that the Telco Director was lying out of his posterior, trying to scare Twitter into doing what they wanted with vague threats of "your competitor will get this money otherwise". It's called a bluff.
rkagerer 4y ago
Some context for those who skipped the article: The major telco said other tech companies regularly collect and sell them this type of granular data harvested from users' phones.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Maybe they were getting this from some ad networks like Taboola or Outbrain - but then those networks don't usually have enough info to really identify you. Sure, if they were giving your IP to a telCo who can map your IP to a name if you're a customer - that's identifying you. It's HIGHLY unlikely this happened at the usual suspects (FAANG).
  - DaveMebs 4y ago
    You think it is highly unlikely that Facebook/Meta is selling granular user data?
    - jsnell 4y ago
      Yes, it's incredibly unlikely. So unlikely that it's basically impossible. They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. (Think of what happened with the Cambridge Analytica case, despite Facebook's hands being pretty clean on that). No disgruntled ex-employees blew the whistle on this but did on other issue), which suggests it probably didn't happen. Selling ads is very profitable. Selling data directly risks that business for little gain. In addition to the backlash when that data selling were revealed, it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete them on ad targeting.
      - SantalBlush 4y ago
        >They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. Companies typically don't admit to the public when they're engaged in unethical practices. Purdue Pharma is a good example.
        jsnell 4y ago
        Then you say nothing on the subject, or say something that's technically true but ambiguous and easy to misunderstand.
      - 4y ago
- emmelaich 4y ago
  Many free wifi places will track and report movements with the wifi area. Using bluetooth in addition. Shopping malls in particular can use this to find where people congregate. Can probably be related to email addresses too, and hence shared with every other mall with same ownership as well as the company that provides the free wifi. e.g. Aruba, Meraki, ...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
anfilt 4y ago
Agreed!
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> We get a lot more than that from other tech companies. Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? As much as I've heard about data collection and sharing by big tech, I feel like I don't see much in the way of samples or example data. Even the forced GDPR data releases I've seen haven't been extraordinarily in-depth. Surely there must be some articles out there that I'm missing?
- sroussey 4y ago
  It’s data brokers they are talking about.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack". And some of the companies brag about their abilities. There was some surveillance company which was showing how Covid spread after spring break in Florida by gleefully posting screenshots from their tool that tracks individual phone locations.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack". Do you have a link? It's always sort of discussed as if everyone knows exactly what's happening, but I'm specifically looking for links that break it down.
- brigade 4y ago
  Sure: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca... It's simple - an app asks for background location permissions, then uploads all the datapoints and timestamps the OS gives them to their servers, which is then resold with "anonymization" that just replaces any personal information with an impersonal unique identifier. That's the reason Apple/Google have clamped down so hard on location permissions since then. But even a degraded dataset is still valuable - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-tour-how-cops-can-browse-your-location-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-to...
jrochkind1 4y ago
You think it's true taht they get a lot more than that from "other tech companies"? (who is that? Facebook? Tik-tok?) (As an aside, it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details, but I'm glad he did)
- modriano 4y ago
  I assume most free weather app companies make money nearly exclusively by selling user location data.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  Your (U.S.A.) cell network provider sells your location. No need for apps!
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    In this case wasn't it was a cell network provider wanting the info from twitter? why'd they want it if they already have it?
    - jagged-chisel 4y ago
      Probably to correlate Twitter user names with telco customers.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        Oh, wow. I didn't even think the request included Twitter handles.
    - shiftpgdn 4y ago
      They (the telcos) only have stats on their customers. Twitter has it for anyone running twitter. Further, twitters location data is likely more accurate than the telco due to positioning from stuff like wifi names, local gps, etc.
- 4y ago
languageserver 4y ago
I do not trust this story. Seems way too absurd to happen in the 2010's. Literally just some guy (tm) on Twitter saying it
- jabyess 4y ago
  which part seems unbelievable to you?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Healthy dose of mistrust is warranted. Still, would it really shock if it were true? In my eyes, it would only confirm what I already know.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Why wouldn’t you believe this was happening? Facebook bought a VPN provider with the explicit purpose of spying on its users and both Facebook and Google convinced users to use what was suppose to be an internal Enterprise Certificate to track users until Apple threaten to cancel the certificate. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googles-internal-apps-on-ios-devices-report-says/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googl... But Twitter had been tracking apps installed on a users iPhone until Apple restricted access to the API that they used. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the-apps-you-download/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the... The purpose of the API was for one app to send messages to another app. But it could be used to tell if an app was installed.
- itronitron 4y ago
  2015 to be precise, which is fairly late in the game. I was at a conference a few years prior to that and some guy was bragging about all the stuff they can find out about people based on their data this and data that. There is some obsession amongst a subset of techies with knowing everything, and that extends to the daily minutiae of the lives of others.
- 4y ago
kkfx 4y ago
I suggest you to think a bit about the context: - the location logs would be collected by a simple application, witch imply the phone/phone OS itself can do that; - they do refuse, Legal teams do not, but nothing state they can't satisfy the request TECHNICALLY. In other words when people tend to disagree with my consideration of smartphone as macro-spy devices bought and kept up by those who get spied as opposite of classic spying gears should think about not only that, but what they do with their (well, not really their, since they are just formal but powerless owners) phones, things like pay taxes, act on their banks accounts, pre-heat/cool their cars etc. Because such activities have a FAR bigger impact than mere position logs.
colinmhayes 4y ago
What I'm confused by is why the telco needs twitter to get that info. I work for a data warehousing/sql consultancy and our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order to comply with subpoenas. They already have all the data about where every one of their users has been.
- chrononaut 4y ago
  > our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order to comply with subpoenas. Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't understand the intersection of why telco's are involved in serving subpoenas and the need to know the physical location of users. Are you referring to a log of networks / DHCP leases their customers were using at any given time?
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Not serving subpoenas, responding to them. Police subpoena stuff like "everyone who was within x feet of this phone number or location between these times" and the telcos can't just say "we don't keep that data."
    - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
      …why not? Is there a federal law compelling then to record and store precise location data indefinitely?
      - colinmhayes 4y ago
        I'm not sure if it's a legal requirement or they just don't want to upset law enforcement. I guess maybe they're just keeping the data for other reasons and then law enforcement is jumping on that. All I know is they're using our data warehouse and having me write queries that answer those subpoenas when they come in. Well I know that in the UK it is a legal requirement, but not sure about the US.
    - novok 4y ago
qbasic_forever 4y ago
This is why I never use native apps on my phone. The experience sucks but I muddle through using the web for reading Twitter, reddit, etc. I am constantly, constantly bombarded with "this looks better in the app! please just run our app!!" as I browse. Still I refuse--with the web I at least know they can't harvest information about everything I'm doing. There are still some privacy concerns of course but it's much better to have the web as a firewall of sorts.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  It's gross because that's exactly why they ask you to install. "This looks better in the app" because they sabotage the web experience so they can do this very thing.
- subsubzero 4y ago
  same, my Wife who has 2-3 dozen apps is asking me why do you not use apps?(I have <10 apps on my phone) and I said I do not trust my data for one second with alot of these unscrupulous apps. I have a strong bias towards privacy - caveat emptor.
- samwillis 4y ago
  Twitter and (old)reddit are better as mobile websites in every way. We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form a queue of things to read. Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that. They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at social media companies, they want to prevent their users leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net negative feedback loop for user satisfaction. Social media apps have no multitasking features (at least last time I used them). It's absurd. I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three years. Will never install the app again. (Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React Native is an attempt to distract developers from the advantages of a WebView based app development process that would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs into the app stores as a distribution channel)
bombcar 4y ago
I suspect other tech companies were claiming that they would have this granularity eventually but never actually delivered. One of the things that happens at these (and the fact that he didn't "hear this" until on site) is that Sales promises everything with a flashy powerpoint, and then what is actually delivered is a "if someone tweets in the Verizon store and uses Verizon in the tweet, you can put an ad on that".
- aorloff 4y ago
  No, there are dozens of companies that have this data.
  - hahaxdxd123 4y ago
    Can you cite?
bewaretheirs 4y ago
I would have thought that a mobile telco could generate this data already just from what they need to route data (and voice calls) to each phone, at least to a somewhat coarse level, without needing to have apps upload this.
- sp332 4y ago
  Yeah but they actually got in trouble for selling that so many times they have backed off. https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_report/?td=keepreading https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_...
- jtbayly 4y ago
  Yeah, they have to be able to. Something about this story just doesn't add up unless this is explained.
  - f2000 4y ago
    They were after data for other carriers and/or more enriched data than they could easily collect. They could use this data for their own marketing and/or network planning. e.g. “We have the least share in market M where some significant proportion of all cellular users , based on twitter data, love NASCAR and spend relatively a lot of time on their phones at racetracks and Walmart. Lets increase capex around race tracks, do a promo with NASCAR and Walmart, and buy some appropriate ads.”
hayst4ck 4y ago
What angers me the most about this, is this type of topic is exactly what should be taught in a required class on ethics for engineering degrees, but is completely missing.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Yes it should be semester 1 in every single CS and SE course. Sadly, there are very few resources; textbooks and professors qualified in software engineering and ethics, and the adjacent political, social and economic realms to fill this. I'm really, honestly doing my best with this problem. The subject area is massive. The issues are horrendously complex. The targets keep moving (each day we seem to set a new bar for what shitfuckery is acceptable). Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily hard (and it makes it worse that I am an opinionated bastard) HN remains one of my best resources for "pragmatic" ethics, and so I thank you all.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily hard Ethics and personal values are the same thing. It would be impossible to write a book on Ethics for [any audience] that didn't consist entirely of personal values. Similarly, since ethics are necessarily subjective, it is impossible to write about ethics in a non-prescriptive way.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      There's actually an entire chapter on that subject; the difference between morals, ethics, norms, laws and best practices, throughout history and in "post-modern relativist" times. You'll either love it or hate it, depending on how open your mind is.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > the difference between morals, ethics That one's especially easy. They are exactly the same thing; mos is the Latin word, and ethos is the Greek one.
jsnell 4y ago
Even if we assume that the OP is telling exactly what happened rather than exaggerating (stories do tend to grow in the telling over 8 years), we don't actually know that this alleged data selling happened. All he knows is that somebody at a telco with an interest in getting Twitter's data claimed that the telco got more data from other companies. What other companies? No details. What data? No details. Was the guy from the telco telling the truth, or lying since that furthered their agenda? We have no way of judging that, and neither did the OP. Spamming this submission with that hook (rather than the parts that the OP had actual direct knowledge of) is basically just spreading misinformation.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  It's also, at best, a claim made by a (presumably non-technical) employee of one of these Big Tech companies' clients. It's entirely possible that they were able to benefit from the data that Google, Facebook, whatever collects while not having direct access to it in any form.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Name and shame them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
legohead 4y ago
He could have been bluffing with that statement. If he already gets it, what does he need twitter for?
rbetts 4y ago
It's hearsay said by an antagonist during a negotiation. This quote isn't by itself trustworthy enough to be news.
tablespoon 4y ago
> “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” > This should be posted absolutely everywhere with this as the hook. This type of request and the admittance that companies give even more than that all the time is headline news worthy. It's pretty well know, but it should be even more well known. IIRC, what's left of foursquare basically does that, lots of "free" apps do it (like weather, calculators, flashlights, etc.). It's the whole reason the "only allow location access when using the app," was invented.
YeBanKo 4y ago
Sale of data should be opt-in, not opt-out. Companies will find a way to go around this and we’ll have to catch up again, but it would be a good next step.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
Carry your mobile phone in a faraday cage/bag. https://www.amazon.com/faraday-bag/s?k=faraday+bag https://www.amazon.com/faraday-bag/s?k=faraday+bag

mdaniel 4y ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html

pixl97 4y ago

https://nitter.net/stevekrenzel/status/1589700721121058817 https://nitter.net/stevekrenzel/status/1589700721121058817 If you're not interested in visiting twitter directly.

imron 4y ago
Nitter is best Twitter.
- appel 4y ago
  FWIW, you can use an extension like Redirector (https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/) to automatically redirect any Twitter URL to Nitter with the following: Redirect: https://twitter.com/\* to: https://nitter.net/$1 Hint: Twitter to Nitter Example: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 Applies to: Main window (address bar) I'm also using this for 'fixing' referral URLs but that's another story.
beeboop 4y ago
This is about on par with people ordering "Kiev Mules" instead of "Moscow Mules"
- lost_tourist 4y ago
  Not really, it's more like homemade mac and cheese vs kraft mac and cheese; in the former you get to control the ingredients
- mmmmmbop 4y ago
  You have a typo there. It's called Kyiv.
  - beeboop 4y ago
    Both spellings are accepted.

itronitron 4y ago

I also assume that Elon and his backers will do far worse things with Twitter users' data.

hersko 4y ago
Why?
- netsharc 4y ago
  I'm not the grandparent poster, but maybe the answer is "there are 44 billion reasons and 1 impulsive guy at the helm"...
- itronitron 4y ago
  because they can
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  Because to some, myself included, Elon has not shown to have any ethical guidance other than self enrichment. Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology doesn't seem like they'd have too much problem selling people out.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    I would make this argument for all of silicon valley. We know for a fact Google and Facebook sell people out, actively, right now. We also know pre-Musk Twitter had a host of internal issues and questionable ethics.
  - EricE 4y ago
    >Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology Your referring to Twitter pre Musk, and not Musk, right?
  - memish 4y ago
    https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

nrmitchi 4y ago

This really isn't a just for Twitter; this is the danger of selling any application with a large install-base. Doesn't really matter if it's a social network app, borderline-useless mobile app, Facebook App (I'm looking at you, Cambridge Analytica), chrome extension, or pypi/npm module, all of these things are capable of collecting extremely fine-grained user detail, and selling it off. It doesn't matter if the current owners don't/won't do it, there is essentially nothing that prevents someone else from buying it up, and doing nefarious things with the existing install base. And as far as "Terms of Service" go, there is essentially nothing to prevent a future owner from updating the Terms of Service, and then doing the above.

woojoo666 4y ago

> As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it. > I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. When has Elon been against user privacy? Also, isn't Elon good friends with Jack? I feel like they would see eye to eye with this. In fact Elon seems like the type that would try to champion emerging fads like crypto, differential privacy, and zero knowledge proofs. Harvesting data is boring and easy.

woodruffw 4y ago
Elon has a significantly stronger profit motive, given his high purchase price and Twitter’s otherwise tanking advertising sales.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  And yet his first move after purchase is to charge for the blue check service. Bringing non-data mined revenue to Twitter is one of the keys for aligning the company with respecting privacy. Either way, stories like this are one reason you should avoid social media apps altogether and never allow an app to access location data, especially not while in use.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Trying to get more users to pay for the service (while notably not reducing their ad profile or how many ads they see) strengthens my point: he’s clearly trying to maximize the value of an unwise purchase, and leveraging every saleable form of personal information is an obvious next step.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Everything published on Twitter except for DMs is open to the whole internet to crawl. It is a public platform. I think it's fair game to serve you ads about Doritos if you are tweeting about potato chips and following Frito Lays. Location based, privately identifiable, data is a bridge too far for me. But we also know for a fact other social media apps already do this if Twitter's app does not already do this currently. The hype about Twitter being an unwise purchase is just noise from the peanut gallery. You should take such noise with a grain of salt. Twitter was always under pressure to maximize value to shareholders. Same with every other tech company. Different companies sometimes make different trade-offs. I fail to see why Musk is somehow going to do any worse than what we've seen from social media companies over the past 15 years. But I do think there's a reasonable chance he'll do better.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

He won the battle (pyrrhic-ly) but not the war. Fine grained location is commonly bought and sold in the USA: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v34a/fog-reveal-local-cops-phone-location-data-manual https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v34a/fog-reveal-local-cops...

scarface74 4y ago
We need more government to protect involved in tech to protect our privacy! Oh wait, it’s the government we need to be protected from.
- usednet 4y ago
  Digital privacy is an illusion at this point. Our chips are backdoored, our fiber backbones are tapped, our VPNs are compromised, our forums are honeypots. I think the benefits of increased government regulation on digital privacy outweigh the potential abuses at this point. What more is there for the government to see? They have everything and more.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So you want to give the same government who is abusing power even more power?
    - usednet 4y ago
      Its not a question of abuse of power anymore. The PATRIOT Act has already given them unlimited power with no checks. Might as well have them use some of their power for something that benefits consumers.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Wouldn’t it make more sense to start trying to take away power from the government then?

ploum 4y ago

For one story like this which emerges because the engineer refused, how many stories we will never heard about because it was simply done? As software engineers, we are just like medical experts talking about the toxicity of cigarettes while ourselves buying cigarettes and distributing them to our own children.

imiric 4y ago
> As software engineers, we are just like medical experts talking about the toxicity of cigarettes while ourselves buying cigarettes and distributing them to our own children. It's even worse than that. Most of the people working in adtech are actually producing cigarettes, and laughing all the way to the bank. Many of them are on this very site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
- moolcool 4y ago
  AdTech (in it's current state at least) is morally indefensible

stewx 4y ago

The Tim Hortons mobile app in Canada did this very thing: monitoring your GPS location 24/7, and logging special events when you entered a competitor's store, like Starbucks. https://www.reuters.com/technology/investigation-finds-tim-hortons-app-violated-privacy-laws-says-canadian-2022-06-01/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/investigation-finds-tim-h...

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
The proposed settlement is absolutely insulting too. A coffee and donut: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-hortons-app-1.6536175 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-hortons-app-1.6536175
- wilg 4y ago
  Should at least have been a Starbucks coffee
  - muddi900 4y ago
    And a Krispy Kreme or a Dunkin. Tim Horton's donuts suck donkey nards
chasd00 4y ago
correct me if i'm wrong but won't your phone prompt you to explicitly allow access to a service when the app requests it? When the Tim Hortons app asks to use your location can't you Just Say No? ...or at most allow once.
- flutas 4y ago
  > When the Tim Hortons app asks to use your location can't you Just Say No? ...or at most allow once. Let us know when you're in the drive through! Just say yes to this prompt. [location prompt] === I've actually been curious about this for a bit, I need to dig in to some apps to see what they're doing. I've noticed, for example, the Chick-Fil-A app does that prompt, and then continues monitoring your location even after you've gotten your order and aren't near the restaurant anymore.

AceJohnny2 4y ago

> And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto. This is something I've been repeating to some of my younger colleagues. Engineers aren't really fungible resources, to the extent that these projects require. Ask any manager how easy it is to swap "allocated resources", and they'll probably sigh heavily. People are afraid that if they don't follow their manager's every request, they will be fired. But remember that hiring is hard, and managers are loath to fire someone they've already spent so much effort finding, hiring, and onboarding. Finding someone else to do it can take weeks, months, or longer! Which in many cases risks killing the project altogether. Even if you're at the bottom of the chain, as the person who does the actual implementation, you have a lot of power on what gets prioritized. See also the oft-circulated OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabotage.html http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabota...

piva00 4y ago
I have successfully implemented pocket vetoing at the most immoral company I worked for, it was a brief stint (caused by the moral issues) where I could play around not delivering all the features management wanted to gouge their customers by playing with other priorities. You don't need to do it, you don't even have to explicitly say no, you can just always find (or create) work that's more important to do than breaking your own morals. The worse that can happen is someone else gets the hot potato.
antognini 4y ago
Reminds me a little of the story [1] about how in 2005 the execs at Google had a meeting to figure out what to call "Satellite View" in Google Maps. One faction did not like the name "Satellite View" because it was technically incorrect as many of the images had been taken from airplanes, not satellites. But the proposed alternatives like "Aerial photography" all sounded awkward. Right before the meeting ended Sergey Brin decided it would be called "Bird Mode." Later on when the engineering team was actually implementing it they thought Bird Mode sounded dumb and just called it Satellite View. And so it has been ever since. [1]: https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569 https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569

galkk 4y ago

I'm not Musk fanboy, but the leap in the end to put the dirt on him is outrageous ("I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data."). Let me try to summarize what author actually said in the end: "I left, I sent email to then CEO of twitter and PER MY KNOWLEDGE the project was canned, I don't know if it actually was. But new guy still could do worse things". If you're so moral, why not blow whistle to public when you left previously, and not write unsubstantiated claims about new owner now.

deltarholamda 4y ago
Ex-Twitter employees blowing the whistle on the highly dodgy stuff they were asked to do during The Time when Twitter Was The Best Twitter and somehow attributing it to The Dark Now-Times Of Current Twitter is very 2022.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
cauthon 4y ago
I don’t perceive the original author to be “putting the dirt” on Musk. It is likely that the third-party partners who were interested in collecting that data remain interested. The leadership who formerly blocked access to that data has left, and the new ownership finds himself in need of new revenue streams. It seems like a reasonable time to call attention to the issue, though I agree with others in the thread that it should be a larger story not specific to a single platform.
- nomel 4y ago
  Calling attention to a problem is great. Assuming the worst path from someone is very different than that, and not so great.
bogwog 4y ago
> If you're so moral, why not blow whistle to public when you left previously, and not write unsubstantiated claims about new owner now. The first tweet in that thread: > With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter. IMO this guy demonstrated an incredible amount of personal integrity here. He likely could have made a lot of money by building this out, but decided not to because he knew it was wrong. This is why we need more laws and government regulation: people that do the right thing like this are very rare. Typical incentive structures don't optimize for these types of people, so legal ones need to exist to limit the damage that the inevitable bad apples will do.

pessimizer 4y ago

> I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. I notice here the casual dismissal of actual, observed harm for the sake of fantasies of future harm. I wish that the similar casual dismissal of government censorship laundered through private media monopolies came with some similar sort of fear of how President Trump or President DeSantis will handle their brand-new tools in a couple of years. That being said, Democrats saw what Bush did with his unchecked executive powers, and didn't roll a thing back when they later had the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Instead, they continued doing politics by executive order, and cemented AUMF as a declaration of a permanent state of emergency.

hayst4ck 4y ago

All individuals are incentivized to do the wrong thing. CEO's are incentivized to sell data to make money. Engineers are incentivized to create bad software via making the people who pay them happier. Users are incentivized to give up their data in exchange for a free service. Politicians are incentivized by political donations and getting information they aren't constitutionally privileged to get. Doing the ethical thing requires making less money (or losing money) for nearly all parties involved. Doing the right thing requires sacrifice. In a happy world, the CEO has long term vision and sees the long term cost of loss of trust. The engineers see the ethical problem or betraying their peers and use their pocket veto to do the right thing. The user should be willing to pay a reasonable cost to receive the service they use. Politicians should see that the individual incentives harm the whole and create regulations that disincentivize the poor behavior. Non-rhetorically: How do we ensure as a society that we live in the latter, and not the former?

louthy 4y ago
That’s what governments and laws are for. Expecting companies to work for the greater good is naive at best; and we shouldn’t really get upset when they don’t. That’s not their motivation, as you’ve highlighted. Strong legislation and independent legislators are what’s needed
- kodyo 4y ago
  You appear to have a misunderstanding about the nature of government, sir.
  - Tryk 4y ago
    Pray tell, what is the nature of government?
    - kodyo 4y ago
      They're run by thieves and murderers.
- 4y ago

timr 4y ago

> I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. The story is interesting, but this line is petty. It's also more than a bit ironic, given that the OP just spent N tweets describing how the previous management wasn't exactly setting high ethical bars. The worst aspect of "Twitter culture" is the tendency -- illustrated here, perfectly -- to slander people, just to make the mob shake their pitchforks harder. I sincerely hope Musk finds a way to fix that.

giarc 4y ago
"I sincerely hope Musk finds a way to fix that." He's currently slandering people on the daily, so I doubt it.
- memish 4y ago
  > He's currently slandering people on the daily, so I doubt it. Examples? If it's daily, you should be able to quickly point to 3 from the past 3 days.
  - EFreethought 4y ago
    He posted a conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack almost immediately after it happened. That's a month supply of being a jerk right there.
    - memish 4y ago
      That's only one example and he deleted it within hours.
  - giarc 4y ago
    Amplifying a false story about Paul Pelosi should be enough but he's also called Kathy Griffin a bad comedian after banning her for changing her name.
    - 4y ago

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

This made me cringe: > Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS. Almost as if was watching an episode of some dystopian show happening somewhere in the future. It's sad to learn it's already happened.

paulcole 4y ago
There’s a reason that it’s called the legal department and not the moral department. They’re paid for legal advice. What’s “right” and “wrong” only sometimes factors into that advice.

jl2718 4y ago

> …Elon will do far worse things… Non-sequitur. The story is about middle management doing evil things for almost no incentive except a small pat on the back for padding a short-term revenue number, while the actual owner-leader who benefits the most shuts it down.

ReptileMan 4y ago
The people that LARP-ed as the resistance need a new enemy. Even today's elections are billed as threatening democracy if the plebs have the audacity to vote for the wrong people. I don't think this is opinion that should be taken seriously - just tribal signaling. And Elon Must is something even worse than a heretic - he is apostate. So he is obviously the worst/best person in the world for people that have no better things to do than to be passionate about the culture war that is going on.

ed25519FUUU 4y ago

This is just one reason why I always prefer to use the website rather than an app. If I use the website I'm browsing on my terms: adblocking enabled, no location data, a lot less surface area for tracking. When you use the app then you're browsing on their terms: geolocation, tracking, ads, everything.

streblo 4y ago

> Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. > Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. I worked at Twitter at the same time, and while the company definitely was going through a rough patch at that time, it was absolutely not anywhere close to 'shutting down' or 'on its death bed' financially.

mikeyouse 4y ago
Yeah this kind of thing is easily verifiable.. Per page 41 in their 2016 annual report, the balance of cash + short term equivalents went from $3.6 billion in 2014 to $3.5 billion in 2015 to $3.7 billion in 2016. Their annual GAAP loss was roughly 1/7th of that. Not the most profitable company in the world, but they had plenty of cash and hand and no real trouble fundraising.
ReptileMan 4y ago
Never let facts derail a good story.

quadcore 4y ago

It's not explicitly said so I gota ask: it's illegal (in the U.S.) right?

wmf 4y ago
No, sadly this is legal and most apps are doing it. Heck, the cellular carriers are directly selling your location regardless of what apps you use.
npteljes 4y ago
US entities sell data left and right, legally. Freakin DMV is selling personal data[0]. Internet providers are selling browsing data[1]. Absolutely nothing illegal about the Twitter request. [0] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-driver-data/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-selling-your-location-data https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...

MockObject 4y ago

What would a Telco do to me with such data? Anything that I would care about?

xrd 4y ago

Anyone using social media services need to pay attention to this story. When the profit margins shift ever so slightly, or say massively like with the Apple changes, then these companies will take meetings with executives like this Telco who wanted data on when people are going into their competitors stores. Unbelievable, or should I say, totally believable and totally expected.

icare_1er 4y ago

Sounds like a good story for Darknet Diaries....

mobileexpert 4y ago

There are tons of data brokers that get near real time user level location data from mobile apps (usually not from ‘name brand’ apps but from the long tail) and then sell this as aggregated data products to others: eg https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/monthly-patterns https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/monthly-patterns .

ForHackernews 4y ago

> Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved them and made them relevant again So in the Good Timeline there's no Twitter _and_ no President Trump?

wintermutestwin 4y ago

npteljes 4y ago
Exposure. Why medium over hosting it yourself? Same answer. As to why the people congregated on Twitter in the first place? Now that I don't know.

rayiner 4y ago

Intriguing: > I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing. > The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” If they have so much data on us, why is the ad targeting so laughably bad? Facebook has recently been pushing me to watch Hocus Pocus 2. -_-

skizm 4y ago

The worst part of these types of stories is every time I tell my non-tech friends and family about this stuff, the vast majority respond with: “so what?” They genuinely do not care about their own privacy from companies. Then they bash Facebook or who ever else is in the news most recently about misusing data and can’t connect the dots. It really feels like a losing battle of trying to save people from themselves. :(

jiveturkey 4y ago

> With Twitter's _change in ownership_ last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter. Generally not true/safe. Any NDA still in effect would be transferred to the new owner. If the author genuinely believes this, they may want to delete this tweet asap. If it's just rhetorical, well ok then.

fleddr 4y ago

This revelation just shows that doing the right thing depends on the accidental and rare "good guy" to hold their foot down. It's not something we can rely on. The Elon Musk burn in that sense is distracting. He hasn't done anything in this direction yet. He very well may, but he hasn't. So it's a false accusation/speculation. Counter to that, there is the fact that Twitter's legal and sales departments (pre-Musk) were totally cool with sending fine-grained location data to whoever pays for it. Controversy should focus on actual events, not imaginary ones. As such, old Twitter has some explaining to do and it's worrying that no actual Telco is named. Finally, a quote like "other tech companies give us far more" should launch a swarm of journalists to dig as deep as possible.

miiiiiike 4y ago

Finally, someone who quit. So many of these stories are from someone who built the thing, profited, left, and then took up a new chapter of their career talking about how everything they did at <BAD COMPANY> was bad and that they should now receive funding, back pats, and NPR airtime for their new <GOOD COMPANY>. My question is always: "So, are you going to give the money back?" There really is a middle ground between just following orders and dedicating your life to sabotaging a company from the inside because someone there once thought about doing something that didn't 100% align with your personal mission. You can refuse and you can quit. More people need to read books on engineering ethics.

thibautg 4y ago

What scares me is that Elon Musk has now technically access to all the logs and even to the DMs.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

SilverBirch 4y ago

Very true about the pocket veto, and I've said this to my team before - I can give advice, I can argue for my values, but my lever as a manager is hire or fire. I don't have time to do the implementation, and the person doing the implementation realistically is going to decide the inplementation. I can influence, but really, they decide.

callamdelaney 4y ago

Why does he assume Elon will do far worse with the data? The anti-Elon narrative is pretty dull and so far generally unsubstantiated.

tbrownaw 4y ago
He's a Them instead of an Us, and is therefore evil and motivated by ill intent.
Kye 4y ago
Desperate people do desperate things. He's staring down the barrel of a $1B/year debt service and a collapsing reputation. That reputation is how he convinces investors to keep giving him money while timelines keep getting pushed years into the future. He's the guy who landed two rockets on live TV (oversimplified, but you know reality distortion fields). If he becomes the guy who fumbled Twitter after playing up how good he would be for it, it's over. This is how "Do No Evil" Google started mining data and buying up the nascent AdTech industry. They weren't mustache-twirling villains, they were desperate to save the company with antsy investors breathing down their necks. They had to do something to justify themselves to investors post-.com bust, and all that data was right there.
- callamdelaney 4y ago
  This is a stretch in my opinion. The biggest issue in this guys story was advertiser money. Musk agrees, hence why he's diversifying income by charging for the tick. Weird that advertisers cut their money immediately.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto. Here's a comment I made a month ago, or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33001139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33001139 I was asked to do an unethical thing, just after being promoted. I declined, but everything turned out OK.

RajT88 4y ago

This take of "Elon will do a lot worse things with the data" is my own personal take on WHY Musk bought Twitter. He's of a libertarian bent, so it could well be a real part of the story that he wants more free speech, and less censorship of similar folks. However, I do believe he is playing that up to try and avoid any discussion of the monumental tranche of data he is sitting on top of and the potential value of it. I recall in the early days, the entire Twitter database was made available to researchers, who found they could predict overall market movement (up, down, some basic idea how much) about 3 days ahead of time by looking at sentiment trends. All of that is worth "Take over the World" kind of money, where as the free speech stuff is, well. Worth percentage points at best.

godmode2019 4y ago

I think this post buried the lead a little bit. "All other social media companies give us more than is" An app logging signal strength can pin point your location, which is then commonly sold to companies such as telcos as alleged in this story. Owning a phone without GPS turned on, any app can track and sell your every movement without violation of any T&C or local laws. That is beyond distressing.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

The author was asked to work on several unethical projects while at Twitter. As stated in the title, this is only "the most" unethical one. Did he refuse to fulfil the other requests.

xnx 4y ago

Good reminder that while Google gets a lot of negative privacy attention it is telcos, ISPs, and lesser-known apps that are the most deplorable actors data collection and selling.

sneak 4y ago

> One of the first areas I worked on was improving the way our mobile apps uploaded logs. Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs everything* users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments.* A reminder: use the mobile web version of any services you use, not the app, and use NextDNS to block all the tracker hosts at DNS level.

toofy 4y ago

> As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it. I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data. yeah, this is a major concern of mine now. while a few months ago i had some minor concerns with elon discussing taking it over, his behavior since this started has elevated those concerns to an absolute red alert level. the kind of data he has access to is terrifying. i’m predicting whatever it is will make the facebook/cambridge analytica thing look tame in comparison.

stephen_g 4y ago

"We get a lot more than that from other tech companies." And hence why almost every app on my phone has location access 'never' and only the ones that really need it have it 'while using app'. Of course, I never even got the Twitter app, I've always just used it in Safari on my phone.

victor9000 4y ago

> We get a lot more than that from other tech companies This is why I don't install apps

sidcool 4y ago

Genuinely curious. Why and how would Twitter have access to all this customer data?

29athrowaway 4y ago
Why: to help advertisers target people How #1: You have a smartphone, your smartphone has GPS, you have Twitter installed in your smartphone. Twitter requests your location, you approve that request = done How #2: You have a smartphone, your smartphone has WiFi enabled. Your WiFi interface can see certain WiFi SSIDs. A Google car wardrived through your neighborhood saving all SSIDs of every Wifi and where they were last seen. Now location services has your location even with GPS disabled.
- sidcool 4y ago
  Oh. Twitter app has so many permissions? What if I use twitter in a web browser?

pyuser583 4y ago

How can I protect against this while still using Twitter? Use a VPN? Don’t give Twitter access to location?

nunez 4y ago
don't use official apps, and if that is not possible, use an ad blocker at the dns level, and give the app as little permissions as you can (be extra wary of giving it bluetooth, mic, location, and photos)

pyuser583 4y ago

Makes me wonder how much “dump trucks” of money is.

cryptonector 4y ago

> We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want. Sales. Sales at Twitter sells user data to Twitter's customers [who aren't necessarily even advertisers]. Got it.

rurban 4y ago

> I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing. > The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” First thing today I did, was uninstalling the Twitter app. Even if it's not in (who knows). Totally forgot about the big apps deals with the global spying business.

tomcam 4y ago

> Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs everything users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments. Maybe other things too

Kye 4y ago

I wonder how many stories like this are waiting to come out from the 2010s, the era that turned the internet into a centralized hellscape that ran on ads and creepy data collection.

V__ 4y ago

For as much shit as GDPR gets (sometimes rightfully so), I'm really glad there is at least some data protection in the EU. The free-for-all that is hiding stuff in the TOS is atrocious and terrifying. Twitter and Facebook being each in control of one person at the top, each with "eccentric" tendencies, makes this situation really dystopian.

throwaway67743 4y ago

I'm confused by the bit that says it's ok now??? If an NDA applied before the buyout it still applies, so why mention it now? Attention? Confusion about how employee contracts and NDAs apply? Not entirely true? Can't figure out which from the thread

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

This reminded me to uninstall the Twitter app, just in case they build in new shenanigans like these now.

bayindirh 4y ago

I don't know what's more disturbing. The request, Legal's response, or the people responding to the thread and finding none of this is unethical. Seems like we have lost something along the way.