Twitter yanks data feeding tube out of police surveillance biz

It IS public data....

Isn't it?? If you are in the business of collecting peoples yells to each other in a forum (which is pretty basic), anyone should be able to use the data as they see fit. If you don't want the yells used, it should be the responsibility of the yeller to not use the service. If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone!! If you put up a microphone (in plain sight) in a park, with a note "we are recording this" what else would you expect??

Just remember if you don't know what the product is, look in a mirror, it is YOU!

And everyone wonders how twitter makes money? Well they try, but nobody wants them to from the looks of it.

Everyone is saying 'commercial usage'. Police/secret squirrels aren't going to pay commercial rates.

Really

" thought-crime laws and organisations trawling for its enforcement deserve to be "unfriended" by social media."

"anyone should be able to use the data as they see fit".

And here's the problem, from two different post, and it won't vary much here after.

Cnuts and fcukwits one and all.

And if you didn't get the social media point then a downvote is a result for the second quote Win/Win

Potential

<sarcasm> All activists are potential terrorists, so we must track them just in case. Oh, better add journalists to that list too, while we're at it. </sarcasm>

nothing is sacred anymore

trust nobody. that is all.

Social media feeds

This is interesting - I guess we should have seen it coming. However it has the possibility that it could be a double-edges sword if enough people post the wrong information on social media. Tweet "Everybody move North" and then run south.

The problem isn't that the filth are buying social media twaddle pre-packaged from pipelines. If people are going to put messages into to public space that can be searched by anyone then the should expect that. You just can't have it both ways that something is simultaneously public and private.

The real root problem is that the filth have a long and storied history of suppressing political activism, a predisposition to targetting minorities and are generally racist cockwombles. But that problem is deeply ingrained in them and goes so far beyond the pointless tedium of social media. All this Twitter shit is doing is giving the filth another way of being the same old cunts they've always been.

In short, if you want something to be private, don't post it publically. There's no guarantee it'll stay private because the filth love surveillance but if you post something publically you can't complain when somebody reads it.

Missing an opportunity

Instead of pulling the feed, the company could have provided a service that allowed people to pay a monthly subscription in return for not grassing them up to the police.

The problem is with the police. That's it. Something has come along that they don't control and they realise they need to be in the loop. Because if something happened on Twitter they didn't know about, they wouldn't be doing their jobs. If they could find out about something in advance, they could do a better job. And whilst this is true to a certain extent it does lead to "let's assign everyone a robot policeman to follow them about all day, preventing crime".

"It's like the cops observing a meeting in a public place, or a conversation on a public street, whatever."

They're not allowed to do this covertly. I'd suggest reading all your online posts without your knowledge is covert. If I knew they read them I'd do thing differently. If a policeman is in uniform the situation is different to undercover cops being present. So yes it is like that but you say it like that would be a good thing and it's not.

I suspect the real reason is simpler ..

.. someone wanted too much money for it. I really don't buy all the concern for user privacy, because if that really mattered they would never have started this whole idea.

I call BS.