14 DAY TRIAL // A group of Twitter users is suing the company for "surreptitiously eavesdropping" on their private conversations carried out via the platform's direct message (DM) feature.
The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco federal court, alleges that the company is well aware of its practices of intercepting private conversations, reading their content, and then altering their output.
The complaint is referring to Twitter's practice of using URL shorteners for links shared on its platform. More precisely, the lawsuit argues that even if a link is properly displayed on the platform, when you click it, it redirects users to the company's t.co URL shortener before sending them to the intended location.
This means the platform has already shortened the link in advance, by scanning the direct message beforehand.
According to the plaintiff's complaint (attached below), "the end result is that Twitter can negotiate better advertising rates."
Google dodged a similar bullet with Gmail
The lawsuit is seeking class-action status, in an attempt to have a better chance at being heard in a court of law. This doesn't guarantee the suit will go through, as a similar class-action lawsuit filed against Google failed in 2013.
Back then, Google was sued because of the very same reason, for snooping inside Gmail messages, extracting keywords and using them to present users with personalized ads.
This recent lawsuit brought against Twitter is almost identical to what Google faced, and the social network should be extremely open to the idea of using the same arguments in its own legal battle.
To avoid being penalized in 2013, Google's lawyers argued that the company was not "effectively" spying on users, but using automated systems, no different from spellcheckers.
The lawsuit came at a very inconvenient time for Twitter, just as the company is seeking to rebrand itself as a news discovery platform, and testing a new feature called "instant articles."
Having a court order in place that prevents it from using URL shorteners in private messages could affect its advertising bottom line.