Twitter has reportedly given the billionaire access to its full stream of tweets and related user data. Is your privacy in jeopardy?
, it is willing to give Musk access to every tweet posted daily, alongside granular user information, in order to allow him to look for inauthentic behavior. Twitter’s apparent willingness to grant Musk access to the datastream comes days after the suitor’s lawyers sentto the company saying it was “actively resisting and thwarting [Musk’s] information rights,” and threatening to pull out of the deal.
The reported shift to grant Musk access to the data is significant, and it raises two key questions: One, will Musk get what he wants from the data he’s been given? And two: What does him gaining access mean for everyday users’ privacy and security? For Axel Bruns, professor at Queensland University of Technology, the move is Twitter calling Musk’s bluff. “By giving him access to the fire hose, Twitter can presumably say, ‘Prove your claims about the abundance of bots, then,’” he says. Bruns believes that Musk and whoever he employs to track down bots would have a difficult time. But even for someone with the requisite skills to handle that level of data, it’s unlikely to be the right method to answer the question.
Being able to pinpoint what makes a bot a bot has been a hotly debated subject in the field of academia, one that experts have devoted much of their working lives to—which is why they’re skeptical that access to all the tweets posted to Twitter will answer the bot question definitively enough to convince Musk to go ahead with the purchase. “My impression is that people tend to overestimate how easy it is to detect bots,” says Leerssen.
Giving Musk access to the fire hose of tweets is a relatively innocuous move, says Christopher Bouzy, the founder of Bot Sentinel, a service that tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter. “It doesn’t expose users’ private data,” he says. “It’s just a stream of tweets.
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