Musk’s plan doesn’t stop there. He’s reportedly weighing whether to force users to share their location to Twitter (and its advertisers) alongside their contact phone numbers that they have already provided for two-factor authentication for ad targeting purposes.

Once upon a time — like in 2012 — this would’ve sounded fine. But these days — when consumers view privacy as they do — stuff like this doesn’t really fly. Companies can’t simply strong arm users into sharing their personal data to continue to receive a service.

It’s possible, of course, but far from easy as Musk is about to find out. Regulators already have their alarm bells ringing over Musk’s reportedly proposed plan.

The data watchdog in the U.K. the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is already in touch with Twitter about the matter. “The ICO is engaged in dialogue with Twitter’s data protection officer and is continuing to assess the potential data protection impacts of any changes to the company and its online services,” according to a spokesman from the regulators.

Similarly, the Irish Data Protection Commission told TechCrunch that it is reviewing the plan. A spokesperson for the regulator told Digiday: “We are unaware of any plans for Twitter to roll this out in the EU and we would expect engagement in advance of any such plans”.

Other regulators could follow given the span of Twitter’s audience. The U.S. accounts for the bulk of the social network’s active users, for example, with a total of 77.6 million users, according to the most recent numbers. The U.K. has around 19.05 million active users.

If Musk is going to stave off regulators then he needs to nail one, key thing. He has to be able to justify to them that getting that data from Twitter users is necessary to provide the service that it’s offering. This is debatable. For example, Twitter, as a service, does not need to know the location of its users for them to tweet. But it does need that location data to serve ads to its users.

In this sense, Twitter’s location data is infinitely more valuable to the platform than whatever revenue it’d be able to make off of user subscriptions.

“Clearly, the big tech companies are more interested in your data than they are your subscription revenue, for obvious reasons,” said Russell Howe, vp of EMEA at data control business.Ketch. “But they never tell you. That’s the problem.”

This isn’t a hot take. It’s inscribed in law. Indeed, it’s the principle of data economy in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and it’s in section 1798.121 of the California Privacy Rights Act …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron