Twitter's New Money-Making Plan: Lead Generation 82
jfruh writes "Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have long hoped that the information they've gathered about you will help them create better targeted and more lucrative advertising, even though advertisers never see your personal data directly. But now Twitter is upping the ante, creating a new kind of card that encourages you to give your contact information directly to people who want to sell you things. For instance, Priceline has a new card with a 'sign up and save' button that saves you 10% on a hotel — and, though it isn't made explicit, adds your Twitter handle and contact information to a Priceline mailing list. There's nothing to stop Twitter from handing this info — including your phone number, if you've registered it with the service — to salesmen."
Re:DPA (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely not. Data privacy laws in the US and EU are quite different.
The closest thing we have to consumer privacy laws are HIPPA [wikipedia.org], which makes medical records confidential, and various laws and court rulings that control wiretapping, surveillance,and random searches. There is a different legal theory at work in US privacy law: US laws aim to restrict of data collection and use by the government (I am sure to get flamed for that because there are gaping holes like email), and the EU Data Protection Directive, to the best of my limited knowledge, aims to restrict data collection and use by private entities.
What Twitter has just done is perfectly legal in the US. Also, the US respects no "right to be forgotten," (which is technically infeasible anyway in my opinion), so if you quit using Twitter they get to keep using your data forever.