Watch: Twitter ‘direct messages’ aren’t as private as you thought
Twitter employees admitted to shadow banning Conservative viewpoints in a video that aired last week and this week they let it be known that nothing posted on Twitter, even direct messages (DM’s), is private.
“Everything you send is stored on my [Twitter’s] server… So all your sex messages and you, like, d*ck pics are on my server now,” Twitter Direct Messaging Engineer Prinay Singh told a Project Veritas journalist earlier this year. “So, what happens is like, you like, write something or post pictures online, they never go away… Because even after you send them, people are like analyzing them, to see what you are interested in, to see what you are talking about. And they sell that data.”
The fact that Twitter can read and share information from DM’s, which many users consider private, was confirmed by Twitter Senior Network Security Engineer Clay Haynes in a meeting with Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe.
“So, when your people have access to this stuff, they can… they can leak it. It happens,” O’Keefe states. To which Haynes replies, “Oh yeah, and it’s a genie out of the bottle kind of thing after that point.”
“Like how do you actually recoup costs… you can’t calculate the cost or the damage of that,” Haynes added.
Anyone using Twitter or Facebook likely knew that their public information was being sold to advertisers, now it’s evident that even the private messages are being scanned and sold for profit and the only way to prevent it is to not use those services.
“Even after you send them, people are analyzing them, to see what you’re interested in, to see what you’re talking about, and they sell that data,” Singh said. And when the Project Veritas journalist asks him if he means regular tweets or DM’s his response was “Everything. Anything you post online…”
Mihai Florea, a Twitter Software Engineer confirmed Singh’s comment adding that “You’re paying for the right to use our website with your data basically.”
Watch the entire video for another insightful look into Twitter and perhaps all social media websites and remember that those private messages aren’t really private.
