Twitter held Accountable by the GDPR for Violating Consumer Private Information via URL-shortening service "t.co"

I think social media platforms are not leaving any opportunity to defame themselves or it’s the profit hunger that compels to cross the limits. This time Twitter came under investigation by the Irish privacy authority for the violation of General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR is the regulatory body that works under the banner of European Union. The purpose of this organization is to protect consumer private information. It takes notice of how a business handles the consumer data.

The action is taken on the complaint by the Michael Veale, the privacy researcher in University College London who filed a report that Twitter refused to give him record on what kind of data they have collected by him.

The action was taken on the prompt suspicion that Twitter is collecting the data by clicking on the link made by link shortening service t.co. Furthermore, when Veale asks for information that is collected by them, Twitter simply reply with “No”.

Twitter has a fix brief explanation about its link shortening system on its "t.co" page that, "Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets."

Furthermore, Twitter has stated on its help forum that, "You (user) cannot opt out of link shortening (feature)."

As mentioned above GDPR make assure that company should comply and share all the information with the user about their data collection. If Twitter found guilty in this they may face up to 20 million dollar fine which is 4 percent of company total annual revenue.

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Data security analyst feels that Twitter may be in deep trouble as if Twitter doesn’t collect data from clicking t.co but still it may be involved in sharing data to the third party. Furthermore, publishers may face the risk, as in most of the social platform like Facebook, Google and Twitter publishers are the one who collects most of the information.



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