Twitter Data Investigation

In Ireland, privacy regulators have launched an investigation to find out how much data Twitter collects from T.Co, which is the URL-shortening system. This is all result of a request made by a UK professor named Michael Veale under the General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR). This is a law that took effect in May.

The GDPR states the people have a right to request any data collected on them from a given company, however, when Veale made that request to Twitter, they claimed it had no data from its link-shortening service. Veale didn’t quite believe this and decided to write a letter to the privacy regulator to confirm if Twitter was hiding some of his data. The office of the Irish Data Privacy Commissioner(or DPC) decided to look into this by initiating an investigation on Twitter. They respondd to Veale with a letter.

The letter states “The inquiry will examine whether or not Twitter has discharged its obligations in connection with the subject matter of your complaint and determine whether or not any provisions of the GDPR or the [Data Protection] Act have been contravened by Twitter in this respect.”

Link-shortening was initially used a way to save characters in the limited space of a tweet. This tool has also been used to fight malware and gathering rudimentary analytics. Unfortunately, analytics services can also result in a privacy risk when they are used in private messages.