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."
Lead Generation (Score:2, Funny)
You mean "not RoHS compliant"?
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.
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Then the question is: why aren't there services like facebook's, google's and twitter's that are honest and let you be the customer, instead of commercial third parties?
I don't mind paying a reasonable fee, if the company treats me like I expect them to.
Re:This is why (Score:4, Insightful)
An individual profile is probably worth (far) more to advertisers than an average person would be willing to pay.
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Looking at figures for Facebook and and Tumblr, it seems somewhere between $5 to $20 per user is a ballpark figure.
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per day/week/month/year/forever?
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That's market cap for Facebook and purchase price for Tumblr, so that is "per user" (for the lifetime of the user/company).
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There's app.net, but nobody (statistically, I mean) uses it. Twitter works because they got there first and loads of celebs, industry leaders etc use it. If you could convince them to switch then it might work, but you'd need people to go first and pay for the ability to post once into Twitter (for now), and again into the new system.
It's a bit like Windows - you don't have to be best, you just have to be first. Well, eventually this breaks down, but this current issue won't kill Twitter because if people
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"It's a bit like Windows - you don't have to be best, you just have to be first."
Sure, but that's for stuff people _need_!
You can't run a computer without OS, but running a life without Facebook or Twitter is actually fantastic.
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you don't have to be best, you just have to be first
This apparently does not apply to telephone companies.
Why should it apply to Twitter etc.?
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If you switch your phone company, nobody else knows. You keep your number, you still call other people on their number.
If you dump Twitter you have to try and convince people to follow you on your new network, you need to add their new ids to your new account (assuming they switch), and you don't even get the chance to ask people you don't know to switch networks - not they would if you did.
Twitter may have been really cool in the early days - I don't know, I joined fairly recently. They seem to have done t
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I'm not sure what any legitimate company would do with your phone number anyways. Most people register with the do not call registry, and the only people who don't follow the do not call rules are breaking the law to begin with. I think twitter would be in for some nasty PR, possibly legal trouble, if they were caught doing business with such an organization.
Unless they're politicians of course - they put specific rules in to allow themselves to spam you in both email and phone calls. This is one reason why
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Probably, because no one who thinks that enough people are willing to pay enough money to make that a profitable business model has started a business in that space. If you think it would be viable, go ahead and start a firm working on that model and prove it.
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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?!?"
Sure you can. Just put some teeth behind privacy policy violation. If a company says it will do one thing and does something else, penalize it. Defining appropriate (and scalable) penalties would require some thought; you need to make sure that it will hurt no matter how big the company is, and you also need to ensure that companies don't get slammed for the actions of one malicious or negligent employee, but that they do get smacked if there's evidence of a pattern of encouraging or even tolerating such em
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.
Getting it backwards (Score:1)
Alchemists throughout history have been trying to make gold from lead, not generating it.
Re:Getting it backwards (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair you need lead in order to start making gold from it. Baby steps!
Lead Generation? (Score:3)
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Ba-da-boom!
He's on phlogiston tonight!
A Dick Move (Score:2)
Not that Twitter doesn't have the right to do this, but it's not cool. This is good for big money and bad for the consumer, and that's exactly why it got posted at the Dictator's Handbook forum: it's a Dick Move.
I use Twitter begrudgingly, but this really turns me off. Maybe I'm a grumpy old bastard but I remember an Internet that wasn't just some huge info-gathering and sales pitch scheme. This new internet sucks and I wish I could turn it off but I'm addicted to it :)
Re: A Dick Move (Score:2)
I have several "tech industry sites" I signed up for because they are relevant to my work. It's not enough that they
Re: A Dick Move (Score:2)
It's not enough that they are basically spam... that went from weekly, to daily, to several times a day....but at least they were relevant spam. Then they started having "white papers" (with spam) that are clearly adver-blogging...
What seems similar to this and Twitter is that they started cold-calling whenever you opened a "white paper".. And they'd reference tat you were interested in blah blah white paper... So you must want to buy stuff. I'm probably one more call away from "unsubscribe" and turning on
OMG My phone number is out there... (Score:4, Funny)
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My phone number is copyrighted. If they pull tricks like this, I'll send them a DMCA notice.
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and I've tried to keep 555-1212 private for so long...
Jenny 8675309 says this is not a new problem!
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On the contrary - you have no contractual relationship with the third party. A sale is just a sale. Twitter has provided information registered on your account, and you've made no guarantees with the third party about your information.
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Unless they can be construed as an intended third-party beneficiary under the contract between the primary parties.
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.
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Possibly - we all assume that, but we don't really know. Perhaps it gets deleted in time. Perhaps in certain jurisdictions they are forced to really delete it.
The point remains that even if the data is still available to the service itself, at least it becomes unavailable for everybody else
Something is better than nothing.
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Two different things. Once you're using social networking services, you've already gone through the "why" and the tradeoffs involved in questions of privacy, self-hosting, using other platforms, etc.
You're already using social networking for whatever reason, so why not try to mitigate your exposure at essentially zero cost (as I said, nobody's going to see your old posts anyway, and most of them are just useless fluff like "great weather today").
Like you, I also keep my interactions on FB and G+ minimal, bu
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I like your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Or whatever.
A quick googling shows that both the Facebook and Twitter API support deleting. I'm tempted to build this.
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Someone is always archiving data like archive.org. :P
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Not if your profile isn't public
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If private, then companies and related ones will probably still have the data in their backups. Even if deleted, they probably still have them somewhere. :(
Could be Worse (Score:1)
Could be Facebook's new moneymaking scheme.
Or
Could be raining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AFf0ysgNiM [youtube.com]
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Yes, but did you remember to register your google voice with a cash-only prepaid cell number, and did you purchase it while in disguise and did you alter your voice if you spoke with the cashier? Have you made sure to re-purchase keep-alive minutes in other states well away from your own? I presume you've never turned the cell phone on and, if so, certainly not in your own house.
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We must control our own data, separate services (Score:2)
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr should be services which use personal data controlled by their own users. If we controlled our own tweets, posts, pictures, and connected them to our friends via interoperable services, then once service providers pull a fast one, we could pull up stakes and go to the next one.
Look into the prototypical Tent project https://tent.io/ for a vision of the future.
TANSTAAFL (Score:3)
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wtf is twatter anyway?
As if... (Score:2)
Will they accept tangible assets? (Score:2)
'Cause then I could turn gold into lead.
There are tnwo types of tech comapnies (Score:2)
There are two types of tech companies. Those who make money by selling you a service or product you pay for directly - an IDE company, a programming company, a game company- and those who sell your personal data to companies =tech and otherwise -who are the first kind of company.
If you didn't pay for it, then you're being sold in some way as a lead . FB, Google, Huffpo, slashdot, all these companies run on some combination of eyeballs (advertising) and personal information selling.
advertisingsucks (Score:1)
Why Lead? (Score:3)
I suppose you can use it in batteries, for UPS and cars etc. (I just bought a battery for the mower, it was nearly half the price of what I paid for the mower in the first place.)
But it would be better if you could generate Lithium
I don't fear The FB (Score:2)
Inevitable (Score:2)
They've already mastered the ability to generate energetic CO2 in large quanitites. It seems they're starting to move up in the world.