Twitter blocks legitimate avenues of tracking. With approximately 500 million tweets each day, it is very difficult for any organization, including sophisticated government agencies, to analyze the valuable information of.
This could help to better understand critical events such as terrorist attacks and human emotions on important issues at a given time.
Apparently, Twitter has no such analytics services. Wall Street Journal reports that the company blocked Dataminr, a company that provides analytics and finds patterns from every tweet posted. Twitter's blocking of the service was reportedly done as the US Secret Service uses Dataminr.
Citing sources familiar with the issue, WSJ reported that Dataminr executives recently told secret services that Twitter stopped working with the company.
A senior official confirmed Twitter's move, saying the company "appeared to be concerned about how close the data was to US intelligence."
Twitter shows that it closely controls its APIs and data it exposes. According to WSJ, Dataminr, which owns a 5% of Twitter shares, was the only service that had access to full real-time network streaming on both current and old tweets. So the US government does not have many close-up alternatives to the network.
Dataminr is a service used by private businesses in areas such as finance, news, corporate security and managementς κρίσεων. Η εταιρεία σημείωσε ότι κοινοποίησε στους πελάτες της για τις επιθέσεις στις Βρυξέλλες το Μάρτιο, 10 λεπτά πριν από τα μέσα μαζικής ενημέρωσης, και ότι έχει παράσχει έγκαιρες προalerts για επιθέσεις του ISIS στη Λιβύη, καθώς και για την βραζιλιάνικη πολιτική κρίση.
Twitter is an incredibly powerful source of information about what's going on every day and about what's going to happen, so you understand how important it is for government agencies.
According to Mashable the latter report The company's transparency report showed that the number of data requests to the US government increased by 65 percent in the last six months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.
The problem with Twitter's decision to stop accessing secret services via Dataminr is that it reduces their ability to seek information about potential risks through legitimate methods.
