Space Karen!
It appears that with Twitter, Musk is taking this to a new level.
There are plans afoot to to require Twitter users to share real time location data and their private phone numbers with advertisers. This is, of course, a direct violation of California law, US privacy regulations, and Twitter's own consent decree with the FTC, but the the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir™ does not care, because he thinks that he is too rich to go to jail.
Here's a suggestion to regulators and law enforcement, frog march him out of his offices in handcuffs:
The good folks over at Platformer broke the news that Twitter is experimenting with Elon’s desperate attempt to make money: forcing people to “opt-in” to share personal info so they can better target ads. And, yes, there’s a contradiction between “force” and “opt-in.”
As everyone already knows, Elon is desperate for revenue, seeing as he took on $13 billion in debt (incredibly, as a margin loan!) and has massive interest payments to make. Yet his own actions have caused many advertisers to abandon the platform, likely driving him further into a hole. And, so far, his only big product idea has been the disastrous rollout of the new Twitter Blue program, for which he’s charging $8/month ($11 if you buy via iOS to cover Apple’s vig), whose main selling point is that you get a blue checkmark… causing people to mock you for “paying for Twitter.”
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That takes us to the new report from Platformer, which makes it clear that Elon’s Twitter is trying to figure out how to increase the amount of money they make per ad, and wants to do that with better targeting of those ads. Of course, right now, that’s… trickier than it might have been at any time in the past. Between EU data protection laws, California’s privacy laws, and other crackdowns on tracking (such as Apple completely kneecapping Meta’s access to private info for ad tracking) it seems that traditionally targeted ads are on the way out.
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It appears that Musk’s solution to this is to force people to cough up their private info.Twitter’s solution: require users to opt in to personalized ads and share their location information, or risk losing access to the service. The company is developing plans to prompt existing users to opt in to personalized ads and will make it the default for new users, according to plans shared with Platformer.So… that seems like the kind of thing that EU and California privacy law enforcers are not going to like. It also seems like the kind of thing that users aren’t going to like and may drive even more away from the service. Remember how AT&T once tried to charge users for privacy? That doesn’t fly any more. If you don’t have a clear need for this info, you don’t get to force users to hand over the data. And I don’t think “helping the world’s second richest man have less regret for his stupidly impulsive purchase” qualifies as a need.
Once users have agreed, they won’t ever be able to opt out, sources said.
And there’s more. According to Platformer, Twitter is also planning on using phone numbers that people provided for two factor authentication for marketing purposes.
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Except, um, as we’ve been saying, it was just back in May of this year that Twitter was fined $150 million by the FTC for… doing exactly this. And using 2FA phone numbers for marketing was a big part of the FTC’s $5 billion fine against Meta. We already wondered if Twitter folks remembered the consent decree that it had with the FTC, but it’s worth noting that the company signed that new consent decree in May specifically around this kind of thing, and I don’t think the FTC will look too kindly on Twitter turning around and doing the same thing after forcing people to “opt-in.”
When one looks at the tech bros in general, and the PayPal Mafia in particular, it is clear that their goal is to turn Honore de Balzac's aphorism, "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime," into a business plan.
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