This might be the year we all broke Twitter. When racist trolls force an African-American actress to leave the network and hundreds of journalists get anti-Semitic death threats on the platform, it?s time once again to re-examine the tension between liberty and protection of citizens.
On the other hand, when the police patrol Twitter looking for criminal activity, that raises red flags, as well.
While Twitter hasn?t been able to do much about rampant racism, it has been firm with law enforcement about perceived snooping. Most recently, after an American Civil Liberties Union report accused surveillance startup GeoFeedia of ?spying,? Twitter and Facebook cut off GeoFeedia?s data stream.
This is a tough one. The feeds that GeoFeedia was pulling from were actually public pipes from the social media brokers, so technically, if you had a lot of time and energy, you could go get this information from the social media sites anyway. Although there?s nothing really wrong with GeoFeedia parsing the data, it feels creepy–and that?s bad for business.
Privacy vs. convenience
Consumers are often willing to trade privacy for convenience provided they get something back. Many people happily give up their data to Google Maps. In exchange, they get accurate traffic information that can save them many hours over the course of a year.
Google literally knows exactly where you are going, and it can tie it all together because you log in with your Gmail ID. The company can then cross-re...