The conversation surrounding the data we put online continues to heat up. Bloomberg reports that in 2015, Twitter sold access to randomly selected tweets to Aleksandr Kogan, the individual who created the personality quiz that Cambridge Analytica then used to harvest Facebook user data. Working under his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research, Mr. Kogan gained access to a random sampling of five months of Twitter posts, covering the dates of December 2014 to April 2015. As of the date of this blog post, Twitter has not provided any further details other than confirming that it provided access to this public data information through its application programming interface, known as API, and that Global Science Research paid for this access. While at this stage, not much is known about Global Science Research’s purpose for accessing this data, it becomes yet another example of a social media company sharing its users’ information, this time for a price. In our interconnected world, it will be interesting to see if social media users begin to retreat from sharing information online or whether such practice is already too entrenched in our day to day life to experience a shift.
