Twitter's privacy blunder

[Commentary] If you want marketers to listen even more intently to what you’re saying online, you’ll be happy to know that Twitter announced that it's giving companies a way to instantly access every public tweet in the history of the site. If you care about privacy, you’ll be troubled by the deepening commodification of our online conversations. What’s said today easily can be data mined tomorrow. Thankfully, Twitter offers meaningful privacy safeguards. But Twitter’s decision profoundly impacts obscurity: It’s now much easier for corporations to access and analyze personal information we didn’t intend for them to have.

[Selinger is a CSM columnist; Hartzog is an Assistant Professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University]