Sarah Downey of Abine writes:
Yesterday, Twitter announced its Certified Partners Program. There are currently 12 partners in the program, and they specialize in one of three categories: engagement, analytics, and data resellers. Twitter says that the certifications will “make it easier for businesses to find the right tools.”
As a privacy company, we sat up when we heard the words “data reseller.” Three of the 12 partner companies–Topsy, DataSift, and Gnip–are data resellers, which means they provide access to all publicly available tweet content over several years (what Twitter calls the “Firehose“).
Read more on BostInno.
What does this do, if anything, to Twitter’s argument in court that because tweets are no longer available on their site, they regain their status as private and not public? And isn’t it inconsistent, in some real sense, with Twitter’s claims that users own their own content? Why aren’t we asked to opt-in to this?