Twitter Hit By Privacy Lawsuit Over Link Shortening In Private Messages

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Twitter Hit By Privacy Lawsuit Over Link Shortening In Private Messages

engine

12:02 pm on Sep 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

Twitter is facing a lawsuit over its link shortening tool and the analytics.

The lawsuit, seeking class action status, will be defended by twitter, which has said, "We believe these claims are meritless and we intend to fight them,"

“Twitter’s algorithms will read through the Direct Message, identify the hyperlink, and replace it with its own custom link, thereby sending the person clicking on the link to Twitter’s analytics servers before passing them on to the original linked-to website,” claims the suit. Twitter Hit By Privacy Lawsuit Over Link Shortening In Private Messages [blogs.wsj.com]

topr8

8:51 am on Sep 17, 2015 (gmt 0)

interesting, seems to me there is some merit to the point.
although technically SE's do that all the time ... although the difference being i suppose that a user hasn't actually posted the link on a SERP

bill

10:27 pm on Sep 17, 2015 (gmt 0)

Always disliked that they forced their own link shortener on us, especially if I was using my own link shortener. The early implementations of their shortener only came into play if the link was too long for the Tweet. That made sense. However, now that Direct Messages no longer have the 140 character limit there's little reason for them to use their shortener there.

This should go to remind people that you shouldn't be using Twitter for anything you consider private.

tangor

5:52 am on Sep 18, 2015 (gmt 0)

Data mining is everywhere. And some of it is blatantly obnoxious.