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. View the suit here.
Twitter is not the first social network to get the law on its side to combat spammers. 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.
Obviously, we want you to come frequently. " Twitter doesn't provide stats on the average amount of time users spend on the site. Alexa, however, pegs that time at about four and a half minutes a day on the site. Stone also outlined his vision of social media — including Twitter — as a positive force. 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. In August, he posted "I want to f--- Michelle Bachman ... with a Vietnam era machete" in reference to the then Republican presidential candidate. We've asked Twitter for comment and will update when we hear back. Update: "We're not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so," Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks said in an email. The company's guidelines for law enforcement say that it complies with lawfully-issued subpoenas, but it also notifies users when such a subpoena has been issued. "Unfortunately, an overview of Mr.
Photo courtesy of ShutterStock. 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. Graham Cluley from security firm Sophos still expects some users to be shocked and, more than likely, outraged. "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 | Underwire. Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT] In a move designed to forestall an IPO for as long as possible, Twitter has a rule barring any investor, including employees, from selling more than 20% of their stock, according to a report. Twitter initiated the rule about a year ago, but it hadn't been made public, according to CNNMoney. The guideline is somewhat controversial within the company and allegedly prompted Senior Technical Engineer Evan Weaver to resign last August. According to the article, Weaver's departure prompted an explanatory email to staffers from CEO Dick Costolo. The email outlined Twitter's reason behind the policy: To keep to the SEC-dictated limit of under 500 investors. Beyond that number, Twitter would have to go public. "We don't want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth," Costolo wrote in his August email, according to the article.
Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report. Costolo's stance on going public mirrors his other recent public statements. 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. On Tuesday morning, the world learned that the account bearing media mogul Rupert Murdoch's wife's name, Wendi Deng Murdoch, is not run by her or anyone connected to her. 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. Let’s review the case. Noah’s account, however, was not fudged. 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. "I would do it differently now," Kravitz told Mashable this week, "but at the time, calling the account Phonedog Noah made all the sense in the world. "Not to blow my own horn, but I was Phonedog Noah for many years," he added. Meantime, Kravitz is in good spirits. "I like the whimsy of it," he says. 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. This isn't the first conflict over who owns your Twitter account, and it certainly won't be the last. When Rick Sanchez left CNN he kept his account but changed the name. What this means to me is that now more than ever you need to get your social media policies firmed up and clarified. Dell's senior legal counsel Ryan Garcia recommends that any firm creating a social media policy take the time to understand how they are going to be using social media before they put anything together.
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.
" PhoneDog cleared the first hurdle in the lawsuit earlier last month when a court rejected Noah Kravitz's request to dismiss the lawsuit. PhoneDog is seeking $340,000 from Kravitz, or about $2.50 for each Twitter user that started following the account @Phonedog_Noah while he was tweeting and writing for the online publication. When ravitz left the company in October 2010 he changed the account's handle to @noahkravitz and retained the more than 17,000 followers he had amassed while working for PhoneDog.
An Update on PhoneDog v. Kravitz, the Employee Twitter Account Case. [Post by Venkat Balasubramani] PhoneDog v. Kravitz, No. C 11-03474 MEJ (N.D. Cal.) In November, the court allowed PhoneDog’s claims against Kravitz for conversion and trade secrets to proceed. PhoneDog filed an amended complaint, clarifying its economic interference arguments (or trying to at least). For what it’s worth, although I don’t know the precise contours of economic interference claims under California law, PhoneDog’s claims look tenuous–especially the one about the disruption of economic relationship between PhoneDog and the followers of Kravitz’s Twitter account. After the court initially ruled on Kravitz’s motion to dismiss, another court (in Pennsylvania) issued its order in the LinkedIn case (Eagle v.
I previously expressed some skepticism about PhoneDog’s case, but I’m even more skeptical now. Other coverage: Before Dispute over Twitter Account, a Fight Over LinkedIn (WSJ Law Blog) A Dispute Over Who Owns a Twitter Account Goes to Court (NYT) Previous posts: 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. " We've asked Twitter for comment on the ruling. We'll update as soon as we hear back. The three Wikileaks supporters had argued the subpoena, which seeks private messages and other information, violates their privacy and rights established under the First Amendment. 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.
On Dec. 14, the D.A.'s Office issued a subpoena to Twitter in order to access the account information of two users who tweeted a list of personal information they allegedly obtained by hacking into the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association. The hackers stole identifying information and Tweeted it to followers. The subpoena requests "available subscriber information, for the account or accounts associated with the following information, including IP address logs for account creation. " The D.A.' Occupy Protestor's Twitter Account Subpoenaed. Twitter Stands Up to Court Order for Occupier's Data. Twitter's Censorship Policy: Three Unanswered Questions. Brazil Sues Twitter Over Speed Trap, Roadblock Tweets.