Twitter Data Scandal

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After Facebook, it is now Twitter who has leaked users' data in Cambridge Analytica Scandal

The recent outrage from different communities worldwide following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the social giant Facebook has been found to breach its own privacy policy and leak the personal data of its 87 million users. The personal data of such huge number of users have been leaked by Facebook to different third-party for targeted advertisements purpose and have been used in the way it is not supposed to according to Facebook's policies. Though Facebook is worse affected in this data scandal yet other social medias have not remain unscratched. Now the name of another very popular social media has come up in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that contain profiles of almost every celebrity, renowned personalities, agencies. In a very shocking revelation to The Telegraph, Twitter have confirmed that it has sold the access of public data to Aleksandr Kogan in 2015. Aleksandr Kogan was then a psychology researcher at Cambridge University and his company Global Science Research (GSR) launched the quiz application "thisisyourdigitallife" that collected data from millions of Facebook users against their consent during 2014-2015. Twitter said that GSR paid and accessed for a single day in 2015 and collected random samples of public tweet between December 2014 and April 2015 but it was denied access of private information. Still it is not clear what Kogan and his firm did with the data but the immediate concern is the theoretical correlation of Facebook and Twitter data that reflects the comprehensiveness of the data collecting process. But according to Kogan they have used the data only for the purpose of "brand reports" and "survey extender tools" without violating Twitter's policies. It also seems from the short access window and randomized nature of the collected data that Kogan and his firm collected the data to study the general trend at a random point of time rather than any sustained and targeted campaign. Thus it seems from recent scenarios that no social media platform can be trusted for the protection of our private information as they are easily sharing them with third-party users in exchange of money.