NO2ID

Twitter secrets for sale: Privacy row as every tweet for last two years is bought up by data firm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2107693/Twitter-sells-years-everyones-old-vanished-Tweets-online-marketing-companies.html

Privacy campaigners condemned Twitter yesterday for allowing businesses to buy access to its archive of millions of tweets.

About seven million people in Britain use the social networking website to post short messages to ‘followers’.

Most believe their tweets are unavailable to those outside their chosen network after a week because that is when they can no longer be searched for on the site.

But Twitter has archived every tweet – there are about 250million a day – and has agreed a deal allowing the UK-based company Datasift to trawl through all those posted since January 2010.

The company will use the information to help firms with marketing campaigns and target influential users.

The licensing deal is part of Twitter’s plan to generate revenue from its service, which is free to its estimated 300million users worldwide.

But the move has alarmed privacy campaigners, with the online rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation describing it as ‘creepy’.

This is at odds with the defence Twitter presented when not handing over details to law enforcement agencies in US. For that they say it isn't Twitter's data but the users and as such they don't have permission from the user to do so. If so, then the users must be asked for permission to use their data for Datasift's purposes.

ahh
Guess the Police don't pay well.
Follow the money...