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."
This is why (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why parties like facebook, google, twitter, and all the other oh-so-social sites want your contact info. Of course, you knew that.
But it's actually rather deceitful to say one thing and to actually do another. And there is a fundamental problem, where information given in good faith for one purpose gets (silently!) repurposed for another. Doesn't really matter that it's because they wants moar monies, it just isn't what you signed up for. Same with "updates" to privacy policies: Same thing, regardless of what lawyers say, or even if laws exist to explicitly allow such a thing: Such repurposing is always disingenious.
It happens all the time, of course. And you can't realistically legislate against it with privacy laws, that can do no more than say "now be nice with that valuable sensitive personally identifying information, y'hear?!?". So people keep on giving false information. It isn't so much retalliation but far more a protection mechanism against the inevitable exploits of marketeering. And then there's parties with a lot of power in the market trying to force you to give far too much and actually correct information, even try to get laws passed to force you even worse.
So I say there ought to be a law allowing the use of pseudonyms wherever you like. If the government is still there for the people, that is.
Delete your history (Score:5, Interesting)
I've often wondered about deleting all of my social networking messages older than [$time_frame], say 6 months.
Social networking like Twitter and Facebook is usually very time-critical: you post something relevant for the moment, but that doesn't really make sense to store for very long (unlike, say, a blog post).
After a few days your post will be so far down your contacts' streams that it will probably never be seen again by a human anyway.
So why leave it up for machines to harvest your data? Why keep posts you did when you were younger and which could possibly be embarrassing later? Why leave open the possibility that through some security failure or site policy change your data suddenly becomes public?
The problem is doing the deleting itself. Going over each post and deleting them manually is a bore.
Facebook, G+ and Twitter are obviously not going to help you automate it -- they'd rather keep your data.
What we need is plugin or site like http://www.deleteallmytweets.com/ [deleteallmytweets.com] but which has a cutoff point instead of simply deleting everything. I wonder how long such a site would survive, particularly if it became popular.
Then there's the question if you'd trust a third party with that amount of access to your profile.