T E R M S O F S E RV I C ET W I TT E R

E X P L A I N E D

JA K E W H I T E N E T 3 0 3|@JW HIT ED IG ITAL

– @ JAC K

“just setting up my twttr”

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey posted the first ever Tweet to Twitter at 10:50 AM - 21 March 2006.

B AC K G R O U N D

Twitter is microblogging, social networking service that facilities the user creation and sharing of short snippets of text, photos or videos known as a Tweets.

There are currently over 271 million monthly active users generating over 500 million Tweets per day delivering hundreds of billions of Tweets as of 2014.

Due to this volume of content and an extensive loosely restricted API, Twitter has become an attractive platform for developers, advertisers, brands, corporations and governments to utilise the data for a variety of reasons.

(https://about.twitter.com/company, 2014)

A Terms of Service (TOS) sets out the boundaries to which an individuals liberties on a service can extend and specifically highlights the ownership and use of the services and any content that is created or flows through it.

Twitter like many web services has both consumer facing products and developer facing products both of which have fundamental privacy ramifications. As such each of these have a clearly defined set of terms that govern the subsequent usage.

Consumer Terms of Service

These concern users and govern the way that Twitter account holders can interact with the service offering and the boundaries around content creation and ownership.

The TOS are broken into 12 core terms. Let’s look at some of the key features.

C O N S U M E R T O S

• You are solely responsible for the use of the services in accordance with the terms.

• You must understand and agree to the terms to use the services.

• Twitter will update the terms from time to time and that it is up to you to keep updated on these terms

• Twitter may advertise to you using the data you provide through your profile or content.

H I G H L I G H T S

1. Basic Terms2. Privacy3. Passwords4. Content on the Services5. Your Rights6. Your License To Use the Service7. Twitter Rights 8. Restrictions on Content and Use of the

Services9. Copyright10.Ending Terms11.Disclaimers12.General Terms

(Twitter, 2014)

1. Basic Terms2. Privacy3. Passwords4. Content on the Services5. Your Rights6. Your License To Use the Service7. Twitter Rights 8. Restrictions on Content and Use of the

Services9. Copyright10.Ending Terms11.Disclaimers12.General Terms

C O N S U M E R T O S

• This concerns data collection. By using the service, you give permission for Twitter to archive and move your data around.

H I G H L I G H T S

(Twitter, 2014)

1. Basic Terms2. Privacy3. Passwords4. Content on the Services5. Your Rights6. Your License To Use the Service7. Twitter Rights 8. Restrictions on Content and Use of the

Services9. Copyright10.Ending Terms11.Disclaimers12.General Terms

• You retain the overall rights of your content. This does not negate existing copyright however, you must seek these appropriate licenses.

• You authorise Twitter to make your content available world wide through all Twitter services and channels.

• Twitter may modify or adapt your content for the purposes of transmission.

• Your content is available to partners of Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication.

C O N S U M E R T O S H I G H L I G H T S

(Twitter, 2014)

1. Basic Terms2. Privacy3. Passwords4. Content on the Services5. Your Rights6. Your License To Use the Service7. Twitter Rights 8. Restrictions on Content and Use of the

Services9. Copyright10.Ending Terms11.Disclaimers12.General Terms

• Twitter can remove your content as it needs to.• Twitter can disclose your information as it needs

to and is required to under law to the government or organisations.

• Twitter can pass your personal information on to third parties inline with it’s privacy policy.

C O N S U M E R T O S H I G H L I G H T S

(Twitter, 2014)

So what can a Twitter and third parties do with my data if I accept?

Whilst a trivial action selecting accept upon signup, the potential downstream affects of where your information might end up is something that we rarely consider.

By looking at some of the current use cases we can see the extent to which Twitter and third parties have the remarkable ability to build up profiles and monitor activity.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter leverages a wide variety of data for the purposes of segmentation and targeting in its advertising service. Information includes:• Who you follow• Who follows you• Content you have favorited• Hashtags you have used• Keywords you have used• Your location

Advertisers can even add on-site tracking through cookies and pixel tracking to re-target advertising to you if you have viewed their website.

As an example, if you viewed a product on a major retailers website, the advertiser could then target product ads to you later on.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter provides an API as part of its developer services, which grants developers access to all public content and profiles.

Expansive as it may be, Twitters popular API being so open provides little control over what third party developers can do with your information they obtain via the API.

Users may opt-in to protected accounts, but a study in 2012 showed only 12% of users had the option switched on.

Furthermore this is not highly stressed by Twitter in their TOS or signup process given that their idea is to create open exchange of content.

As a result, there are thousands of companies accessing Twitter data and creating consumer apps, B2B apps and using it for internal purposes.

Twitter API

Social listening Tools provide brands with market intelligence so they can better inform their content marketing strategies. Many of the top fortune 500 companies leverage social listening as a form of intel on their fans and brand.

These services utilise the API to archive data and provide to their clients.

(L.R: Sprinklr, Topsy, Adobe Social, Sysomos [Licensed under fair use license])

Twitter API - Social Listening Tools

Social profiling tools and community management tools have become popular for brands to easily profile their followers into segments and utilise these for further advertising and customer service analysis.

These tools often go much deeper than Twitters own data with many linking up user profiles cross social networks and integrating into their own CRM databases.

This then allows the brand to monitor everything that the user is saying about the them.

Twitter API - Social Profiling, Community Management

(L.R: Sprinklr, Adobe Social [Licensed under fair use license])

The TOS outlines that:

“You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the

Services and to make make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other

companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast,

distribution or publication”

Not surprisingly as a result of the broad nature of this term this can be observed via one of the larger and controversial Twitter partnerships with the US Library of Congress.

Partnerships

The US Library of Congress maintains a constantly updated archive of all public Tweets that occur.

This is done with the intent of cultural preservation as self described by Twitter.

But we have to scrutinise the rights to which the government has over archiving a users Twitter information.

How many other government organisations archive our Tweets?

Partnerships - Library of Congress

Jackson, W. (1896). Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. [Photograph] [Public Domain]

Get the point?

Your data could literally be in anyones hands.It takes 5 minutes to sign up for a developer account and you have instant access to all public profiles and Tweets.

It’s not all bad though.

Twitter has deeply philosophical motives for wanting to create an open exchange of content and information on the World Wide Web.

Whilst by clicking the accept you grant Twitter the ability to pass on your content and user data they maintain that it is one of their fundamental principles to not submit your personal details on to the government or third parties.

This can be recognised in their annual transparency report that outlines the requests from government bodies around the world for personal account details.

(But do note, this is not in the TOS - it is nearly a guiding principle)

So what have we learnt from the TOS?

Twitter is particularly broad in describing the extent to which your content and personal information can be utilised by Twitter itself and by third parties that without looking into, an individual would never realise the brevity.

There is a lot of legal jargon, leading to confusion and often perceived contradiction when trying to understand them.

Fortunately Twitter takes transparency seriously and has made several proactive steps to ensure users are aware of the use of their data before they join.

Nonetheless it is still a minefield to either accept and compromise your rights or deny and miss out on the experience.

So do you still accept?

AC C E P T - T L ; D R D O N ’T AC C E P T - M I S S O U T

T H AN K YO UB I B L I O G RA P H Y — >

B I B L I O G RA P H Y

Barbaro, M., & Zeller, T. (2006, August 9th). A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. New York Times. Available: http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/AOL/exhibit_d.pdf

Beevolve. (2014). An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Across the World - Beevolve Social Media Analytics. Retrieved 23 October 2014, from http://temp.beevolve.com/twitter-statistics/

Blog.twitter.com. (2010). Tweet Preservation | Twitter Blogs. Retrieved 22 October 2014, from https://blog.twitter.com/2010/tweet-preservation

Blog.twitter.com. (2014). New ways to create and use tailored audiences | Twitter Blogs. Retrieved 23 October 2014, from https://blog.twitter.com/2014/new-ways-to-create-and-use-tailored-audiences

Dev.twitter.com,. (2014). Developer Policy | Twitter Developers. Retrieved 22 October 2014, from https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/policy#3._Respect_Users’_Control_and_Privacy

Goettke, R., & Christiana, J. (2007). Privacy and Online Social Networking Websites. Computer Science 199r: Special Topics in Computer Science Computation and Society: Privacy and Technology.

Lessig, L. (1998). The Architecture of Privacy. Available: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/works/lessig/architecture_priv.pdf.

Transparency.twitter.com. (2014). Twitter Transparency Report. Retrieved 22 October 2014, from https://transparency.twitter.com

Twitter.com,. (2014). Twitter / Twitter Terms of Service. Retrieved 22 October 2014, from https://twitter.com/tos