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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how you'd manage "privacy outrage" over Twitter messages, since they're almost always public.

The concept of "Privacy" means to me that the average user is aware of how their profile, their content, etc is going to be used by the host.

There's a difference between the perception of your feed being public, and Twitter selling your feed data to a corporation to utilize for targeting, advertising, reselling to employment agencies in the future long after your stupid teenage profile is deleted, whatever.

When a solid 10% of the users are kids (and a much much larger percentage is entirely clueless) it's worth questioning and the people that do know what's actually going on have a responsibility to ask questions.

That's my best attempt to get fired up about privacy on twitter, you forced my hand - oh won't you please think of the children?

Ref twitter age - http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-net...

I think you have the concept of "Privacy" confused with the concept of "Transparency". And, my point is, you specifically don't have privacy on Twitter.

I'd rather not get into a discussion of what "privacy" means, but Twitter (and Facebook) are almost certainly violating most of their users' perceptions of what Twitter does with their tweets. That said, if they anonymize the tweets and hold the buyers contractually obligated not to de-anonymize them, I think most users would be OK with that. Each user owns their tweets, as does Twitter, but only Twitter owns all of the tweets.

It's a broadcast medium. People literally keep score with each other about how many people they can get to follow them, and how many people they can get to RT their messages. I think you're simply dead wrong about this.

1. Reality and perceptions don't always collide. Like the people that post messages on Facebook about calling into work sick when they aren't... only to have their boss read the message and fire them over it.

2. What about the people whose Twitter accounts are private?

3. The people 'racing' with each other for followers or retweets are by definition more public than most other people. Unless you are going to claim that all or most Twitter users fall into that category. Trying to use them to categorize the user base of Twitter as a whole seems a bit off.

4. Twitter is a broadcast medium, but what we are talking about are the perceptions of the people using it, not the reality of the situation. There are plenty of people that broadcast stuff publicly that they wouldn't want their parents to read. Why would they do so? "My parents aren't on Twitter." I'm sure the same thing applies to bosses and the workplace.

In what sense do you think each user "owns" their tweets?

In most cases it's not at all, here's a good page on the topic: http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com

Twitter has no privacy model, so there can't be any privacy outrage. All tweets are public, it's just a matter of whether or not they show up on your feed.

And if Twitter wants to make an extra (maybe morally gray) dime off of any "privacy outrage", they can offer certain users to pay a fee to have their tweets NOT included in these dump.

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