海角大神

If you want marketers to listen even more intently to what you鈥檙e saying online, you鈥檒l be happy to know that Twitter 听that it's giving companies a way to instantly access ever public tweet in the history of the site. , that's more than听500 billion tweets.

If you care about privacy, you鈥檒l be troubled by the deepening commodification of our online conversations.

Twitter might be surprised to learn that anyone鈥檚 unhappy with its initiative. After all, it's giving brands access to only public tweets, and we鈥檝e been lulled into thinking that we check our privacy interests at the door the moment we disclose anything in public.听But as the much-repeated saying goes, the 鈥淚nternet never forgets,鈥� and this means what鈥檚 said today easily can be data mined tomorrow.

Thankfully, Twitter offers meaningful privacy safeguards. It allows users to 听accounts so that anyone who wants access to a profile must be manually approved. So, tweets from protected accounts do not show up in public timelines. If you don鈥檛 take this option and instead choose an account that will display your tweets to anyone, Twitter can wash its hands of further responsibility. The common narrative is that publicity seekers only have themselves to blame if uninvited guests, including corporations, listen in on their conversations.听

At the same time, Twitter鈥檚 decision profoundly impacts obscurity: It鈥檚 now much easier for corporations to access and analyze personal information we didn鈥檛 intend for them to have. Ongoing concern exists about how , and now tweets are going to in Google searches. With its decision in听2010 to let the Library of Congress , Twitter is on a troubling course.听

Of course, the Library of Congress is a cultural institution with scholarly interests. It鈥檚 not a for-profit-corporation that wants to sell us things听or sell 鈥渦s鈥� to companies. And, like many cultural institutions, the Library of Congress is plagued by funding and efficiency problems that limit what it can do with social media disclosures. As Politico recently reported, the 鈥�.鈥�

But the new obscurity shift poses a problem for Twitter users who find themselves unsure of how to weigh the benefits of protecting their accounts against the inconvenience that comes with it. Of course we should expect users to have a basic understanding of the tradeoff between personal data and free apps. This is 2015, after all.

But it's one thing to grasp this intellectually, and quite another thing to keep it in mind when actually using a social media platform. In fact, social media sites are designed to make you forget about the costs of disclosure and share at full speed. and caution might hamper the data flow. Instant feedback and maximize disclosures. When you're on Twitter, your attention is drawn to things you say, replies people make to your comments and questions, and a range of remarks 鈥� jokes, confessions, astute comments 鈥� that come from folks you choose to follow.

Twitter isn't just an environment where ideas are shared. It's a highly constructed environment that's designed to make you feel like intimate exchanges are happening without giving a second thought to how everything will be monetized.

On a personal level, one of us has . But even as a privacy professional, this decision is criticized as counterproductive to the medium.

There鈥檚 a cost to protecting a Twitter account. While protected accounts are obscurity-friendly, they鈥檙e also harder to follow. And they鈥檙e harder for others to interact with.

Explicit permission is needed to follow a protected account. By contrast, public accounts can be followed automatically.

Trying to decide whether to follow a protected account? Good luck. All of the tweets and the list of followers are locked down. All you鈥檝e got to go in is the account name 鈥� and the name doesn鈥檛 necessarily clue anyone in as to who runs the account.

Retweeting also is comparatively labor intensive on protected accounts. Twitter鈥檚 system is designed so that only public tweets can be widely shared at the touch of a button. While this may seem like a trivial point of friction, it can deeply impact whether a dominant form of communication on the platform gets exercised.听听

Bottom line: How can anyone reasonably determine if Twitter鈥檚 transaction costs are worth taking on without having a clear sense of what鈥檚 at stake if you brush them off?

, Policy Council at the (where one of us is a senior fellow), sees Twitter鈥檚 approach to cozying up with companies as more complicated than meets the eye. He argues Twitter should be more sensitive to how users view the platform, and it should provide more choices than currently are available.

鈥淲hile Twitter has been clear that everything you post is public, Twitter must recognize that tweeting publicly and selling a fire hose of data that companies can then link to emails and actual customer identities are not the same thing, and begins to stress user expectations. Twitter should provide an opt-out to their users for this sort of practice.

Also, companies should realize that even though their customers may have posted something 'publicly' on Twitter, customers are likely to be quite surprised that every burp and belch they make on Twitter is being used to profile and market to them. Companies that dip into this data will need to think hard about which uses are appropriate and which might be deemed wildly out of context.鈥�

It鈥檚 not clear exactly how much of Twitter鈥檚 treasure trove it will reveal to businesses and we also don鈥檛 know the manner in which this information will be shared.

Will Twitter follow Facebook and create a for advertisers that obscures the identity of its users? Or does the "public" nature of the tweets mean Twitter doesn鈥檛 feel compelled to protect the privacy of its users in giving businesses exclusive backstage access?

Twitter cleverly used the concept of 鈥減ublic鈥� to leverage our intuitions about information that is 鈥渘ot private,鈥� but the reality of public data is . Both and are increasingly aligned against the idea that mere accessibility and localized disclosure strip data subjects of any privacy interest in that information and absolve companies from any privacy obligations.

When talking to our friends and colleagues on social media, it鈥檚 easy to forget we鈥檙e really speaking directly to companies that need to monetize our data to grow. If these companies don鈥檛 give us good options for responding to diminished obscurity, they aren鈥檛 taking our privacy seriously.

听is an associate professor of philosophy at听. Follow him on Twitter听.听

听is an associate professor at听. Follow him on Twitter听.听

听