Twitter Sues Five Spamming Sites. Twitter's had it with spammers and wants to send a message with the help of law enforcement.
On Thursday, the company filed a suit against five separate web tools and providers that allegedly make it easier to spam people on Twitter. "Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, and we continue to grow at a record pace," Twitter said in a statement. "As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers. Even though spam is a small fraction of the content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be. " The defendants in the suit are TweetAttacks (tweetattacks.com), TweetAdder (tweetadder.com), TweetBuddy (tweetbuddy.com), James Lucero (of justinlover.info) and Garland Harris (of troption.com), and are allegedly in violation of The Twitter Rules. Twitter Co-Founder: Spending Too Much Time On the Site is 'Unhealthy'
Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, told an audience in Montreal this week that spending up to 12 hours a day on the platform is not necessarily a great idea.
"To me, that sounds unhealthy," he said on Wednesday at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal business conference, according to a report in The Guardian. Stone told the audience that users should leave the site after they found the information they were looking for. "I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you've found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something," Stone said, according to the report.
"I think that's a much healthier engagement. Twitter Ordered To Turn Over I.D. Of User Who Threatened Bachmann. Twitter needs to turn over the identiy of a user who made threats against Rep.
Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., according to a federal judge's ruling that was released Thursday. The user was identified as Mr. X in court papers. Twitter Turns Over User Information In Criminal Probe Of Occupy Boston. Twitter Is Selling Your Old Tweets [REPORT] For Sale: Your Old Tweets. Twitter is the latest social network to turn a buck with content you created.
The company sold two years worth of old tweets to Datasift, a marketing data firm. Datasift will make the tweets and other data, including the locations of where people were when they used Twitter, available to its clients. Datasift is the first of what is believed to be more than 1,000 companies on a waiting list to purchase the data.
We've asked for Twitter to comment and will update as soon as we hear back. By now, most people know that social networks generally claim ownership of content and other data users post using their services. "You thought that tweets you posted months ago had vanished, or were simply hidden away so deeply and awkwardly on the Twitter website that they would be too difficult to uncover? Twitter Pulls Plug on @OscarsAudioGuy Spoof Account. Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT] Twitter: Yes, We Keep Your iPhone Contacts Too. Twitter has acknowledged the "Find Friends" feature on its iPhone app stores contact lists on its servers, echoing a recent controversy surrounding the Path iOS app.
UPDATE: Wednesday afternoon, Apple issued a statement saying iOS apps accessing users’ contact lists will require explicit permission. After users opt to have the Twitter app search their phones, the company stores their address book's names, emails addresses and phone numbers on its servers for 18 months. Like many other iOS apps, Twitter allows users to have the app "scan your contacts for people you already know on Twitter. " Until now, the storage aspect had not been explicitly stated in Twitter's privacy policy nor did the Find Friends function specify it would be transmitting and storing data. Twitter's policy stated that "Log Data" could include IP addresses, browser types, referring domains, pages visited, mobile carriers, device and application IDs, and search terms, among other activities.
Twitter Admits Verifying @Wendi_Deng Was a Mistake. What Are Your Twitter Followers Worth, and Who Owns Them? A new lawsuit values a Twitter follower at $2.50 per month and argues that each one belongs not to the tweeter, but to their employer.
The ramifications for employees who tweet and who leave their company are huge, says Brian Ries. It wasn’t too long ago when hastily departing employees were denied the chance to grab Rolodexes from atop their desks. Goodbyes were brief. Doors were held open. The tragedy, as it were, was that these outgoing employees were swiftly neutered of their networks—that giant web of business contacts mapping those with money to those who seek it—and forced to start over at their next place of employment.
Thankfully, and in no small part due to the rise of the personal computer and the exportable contact list, that world’s nearly left us—until, perhaps, now. A recently spotlighted lawsuit between a mobile phone review website and a departed employee threatens to bring it all crashing back. Company Sues Former Employee for Value of 17,000 Twitter Followers. Meet the Writer Being Sued For His 17,000 Twitter Followers.
At any conference, product launch or other event where the top tier of tech reporters gather, Noah Kravitz is easy to pick out of a crowd. He's the affable guy with glasses, earring and a cue-ball head; a supersmart cellphone-loving thirtysomething with a finely tuned sense of the absurd. Online, Kravitz often goes by the handle "Kravy Krav," an homage to hip-hop legend Flavor Flav. KravyKrav was also the name of his very first (and now inactive) Twitter account. And if that had been the only Twitter name Kravitz ever went by, he wouldn't have made news this week. But his subsequent Twitter account was @Phonedog_Noah, and that has led to an eyebrow-raising lawsuit from his former employer.
Time To Revise You Social Media Policy on Who Owns Your Followers. Earlier this fall, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by PhoneDog.com against one of its long-departed employees, Noah Kravitz, has merit.
According to Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, the company is suing Kravitz over three points, including trade secrets and misappropriation of the account. The ruling, reported by Goldman and the New York Times, states that Kravitz is liable for several hundred thousand dollars in damages, calculated at $2.50 per month per Twitter follower. Lawsuit Over Twitter Followers May Not Set Precedent For Similar Cases. The outcome of a lawsuit in which a company is suing a former employee over Twitter followers will most likely hinge on how the list was developed and what value each side places on the followers, according to legal experts.
"This case is another example of the application of relatively old legal rules applied to new technology," said Bill Nolan, an attorney with Barnes & Thornburg LLP. "It's the 2011 version of the salesperson taking the Rolodex when he/she leaves the company. " An Update on PhoneDog v. Kravitz, the Employee Twitter Account Case. [Post by Venkat Balasubramani]
Twitter Ordered To Turn Over Data On WikiLeaks Backers. Twitter will have to comply with a ruling by U.S.
District Judge Liam O'Grady to turn over information collected in the accounts of three WikiLeaks backers. Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jónsdóttir, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Dutch activist Rop Gonggrijp had filed a request blocking the subpoena while the case was considered by a federal appeals court. O'Grady denied the motion, saying their appeal had little chance of success based on existing U.S. case law. "Litigation of these issues has already denied the government lawful access to potential evidence for more than a year," O'Grady said in his ruling. "The public interest therefore weighs strongly against further delay. " Leaked Twitter Subpoena Raises Online Privacy Issues. UPDATE: Twitter would not comment on this particular matter, but gave us this statement: "To help users protect their rights, it is our policy to notify our users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so.
" The leaked subpoena sent to Twitter this month by the Suffolk District Attorney's Office in Boston is causing some hoopla on the web and raising the issue of law enforcement's access to online personal data. Occupy Protestor's Twitter Account Subpoenaed. Smacked with yet another subpoena, Twitter must submit an Occupy protestor's account information to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office — unless the account holder can stop the order before Feb. 8. The District Attorney's Office issued a subpoena for Malcolm Harris (at the Twitter handle @destructuremal) on Jan. 26.
Twitter Stands Up to Court Order for Occupier's Data. Twitter's Censorship Policy: Three Unanswered Questions. In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access by its citizens to Twitter, Flickr and a number of other US-based websites. Social media being already widespread throughout the country, perhaps the Chinese government feared the possibility of events like unfolded elsewhere 18 months later, in what became known as the Arab Spring. Two and a half years later, Twitter remains blocked in China, though many people find ways to make use of it none the less.
Brazil Sues Twitter Over Speed Trap, Roadblock Tweets.