Monday, December 01, 2014

Twitter is taking a page out of Facebook and Google's playbook

According to Business Insider, Twitter will soon be changing its terms of service so that it can monitor the other apps that users have on their phones. There are major privacy and user experience issues that arise with this new policy. Ultimately, it comes down to a universal technology dilemma: How much control will we give technology to improve how it serves us?

Twitter contests that it can make better products and better understands the needs of its customer by being able to track what apps its users are also interacting with; however, Twitter won't have access to the actual content that user access in other apps. Twitter makes the case that other technology companies such as Facebook and Google already have much more access to user data; in fact, Facebook has started to replicate Google's search model where users remain within the Facebook app when they access outside content.

Obviously, Twitter believes it needs to keep up with these other tech behemoths to predict what is "the next big thing". While this can be a great development for small upstarts looking to be acquired, it also presents an unfair advantage given that Twitter and Facebook have the ability to quickly replicate services and products it deems to be threats.


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