Twitter Plans to Sell Your Tweets

Twitter’s Data Strategy Chief Chris Moody has revealed that the social network is planning to sell trillions of tweets to data miners to facilitate targeted marketing. According to Moody, tweet data could be used for a myriad of different purposes, both commercial and social, from targeting new parents with baby clothes to gauging mood while policing football matches.

Moody said, “Twitter gives this fascinating ability to understand people in a context like we’ve never been able to do before. It’s not ‘I know that Chris Moody is a 48-year-old male’ – which is how we’ve thought about marketing in the past – but ‘I understand that Chris Moody is dealing with the death of a parent because he’s talking about it on this public platform’.”

He added that by using Twitter, a person is effectively saying: “I’ve stepped up to the microphone and I’ve said I want the world to know that this thing is happening in my life.”

Twitter already sells some data garnered from its users, but so far it only makes up a fraction of the company’s income: $70 million out of its $1.3 billion turnover last year.

The social network has no plans to sell direct message data, but everything else is fair game, as suggested by Twitter’s unambiguous privacy policy: “What you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly.”

Source: The Guardian