Twitter users’s privacy betrayed: Twitter sold tweet archive

containing over millions of tweets from users.

New York / NationalTurk – Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has emerged as hundreds of companies stand in line to purchase users’ personal information from the newly composed database.

Twitter had archived every tweet and will now be rewarded for its ingenuity. DataSift, an Uk-based  provider of a scalable platform plans to charge companies up to £10,000 a month to analyze tweets posted each day for anything said about their products and services after it announced that the company has bought every tweet posted since January 2010.

Twitter to release and sell 2 year Archive of Tweets

In the announcement coming from DataSift it was pointed out that carriers could search tweets back to January 2010 for managing large volumes of information from a variety of social data sources. For insurers, this data could be used to make lay-outs of marketing campaigns, target potential customers or gather evidence for claims processing. DataSift’s Historics is a cloud-computing social data platform that enables businesses to extract insights and trends that relate to brands, news, public opinion and … actually anything you could ever need… from Twitter’s public tweets. Now entrepreneurs will have access to billions of tweets, which literally means they will purchase every Twitter user along with all his secrets, GPS-location included.

An estimated 300 million Twitter users could be classified as potential victims whose personal info has been sacrificed on the altar of global marketing. It has been reported that private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site. Nevertheless, privacy campaigners are on red alert.

Twitter and Facebook : Goldmines for global information

Every time we use social networks we become mere product, that can be turned into benefit. The business intelligence and data-mining platform of DataSift will be the first company ever to offer the archive for sale.

DataSift claims it is planning to squeeze from another goldmine of global information – Facebook – in one month. The latest data from comScore, an Internet marketing research company, states the average Facebook user spends around 6-7 hours a day using the social network. Now that the relatively laconic Twitter has turned dangerous, just imagine how much riskier it is to post something for six hours a day.

Justin Basini of the data privacy company Allow states: ‘ Marketers will stop at nothing to get hold of your data. This move shows all those throwaway tweets have suddenly become a rich new revenue stream for Twitter… It has taken a stream of consciousness, analyzed it, bottled it and sold it for a profit. And the worst thing is, you never knew it was going to happen.’

What about the law protected you from virtual thieves? Non-existent, and yet on the contrary – it actually supports and encourages thieves to abuse you and steal your personal information. DataSift now brings to the table what it calls “an invaluable information source” with 250 billion tweets posted in 2010 alone. Historics is available today as a limited release to existing customers and is scheduled to be generally available in April 2012.

Do you agree your tweet is priceless?

DataSift currently takes in roughly 250 million tweets every 24 hours, all of which are analyzed for content—and for tone or sentiment. By combining log location data and social media influence based on existing services from Klout, a firm that provides a score based on when you recommend, share and create content, the service does keyword searches to analyze a topic and pull Tweets related to the topic, even if it is not named in the search. Private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site.

Twitter turned out to be craftier than most users suspected. BBC suggests , the cost to businesses will depend on the company’s size, with DataSift’s entry-level package costing £635 ($1,000) per month for ‘ individuals or developers.’ Twitter, meanwhile, will garner revenue from DataSift as part of a licensing fee, informed DataSift.

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