Gareth Corfield writes: Earlier this week suicide prevention and counselling charity the Samaritans launched an app that scans Twitter timelines and alerts users whenever anyone appears to be depressed. Yet the backlash against this creepy automated scanning is astonishing – and the Samaritans appear to be ducking their legal obligations. Read more on The Register, where Gareth really…
Category: Online
Facebook Snooping By First Wife Reveals Her Husband’s Bigamy
If you’re going to commit bigamy, it’s probably not a good idea to have pictures of your bigamous wedding up on Facebook. Of course, if your second wife doesn’t know you’re already married, that may happen.
Samaritans ‘suicide Twitter-sniffer’ backfires over privacy concerns
Jennifer Baker reports: In response to public outcry via Twitter and personal blogs on Wednesday, the Samaritans have announced an opt-out function for their stalker-friendly app Samaritans Radar. Samaritans Radar automatically scans the tweets of anyone the user follows and alerts subscribers to potentially suicidal tweets based on “trigger phrases”. However well-meaning the intention, many…
Twitter and IBM strike data mining agreement, Report
IBM and Twitter inked a deal Wednesday that will give businesses a way to mine the social network for insight, forecasts and business insights. IBM, which has struggled to move the needle on its cloud business as it shifts focus from hardware to cloud, software and services, said it will offer Twitter-based Insights-as-a-Cloud service tied…