But its fair to say that it would not have been a problem had the coverage been positive. This is the price of playing with the big boys, you have to stick up for your partners.
There is no way you can go the media company route (vs. the api/infrastructure route) and not get this conflict.
It's worth pointing out that the address in question is a corporate address (Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com). That address is surely about as "personal" to Zenkel as the 30 Rockefeller Plaza address is.
Are business e-mails considered personal/private information - legally speaking - in the USA?
I was under the impression that non-business e-mails, phone numbers and addresses were considered private, but anything related to a business was fair game.
Did you read the OP's comment or that Wikipedia article? That has nothing to do with what he asked which was whether corporate emails were considered private. You're citing a case about trespassing by somebody who already had access to the email addresses.
Even though technically the email address is not a non-public one. As pointed out in the article the email address can be found via a simple Google search.
"Findable via google" doesn't mean "okay by our ToS to post it." Even Reddit will stomp on you if you post someone's home address that you find via the google.
I think it's arguable whether his work address is "personal information" or not.
EDIT LoganCale points out that I am wrong. He's right.
I'm pretty sure his employment contract deems the address as property of NBC Universal, therefore it's impossible that it could be Gary Zenkel's private email.
It's an email owned by a public company, that's about as public as you get.
Twitter's ToS* states "If information was previously posted or displayed elsewhere on the Internet prior to being put on Twitter, it is not a violation of this policy." and it appears in at least one location online from long before this incident: http://www.fidei.org/2011/06/boycott-nbc-removed-under-god-f...
* This is actually not directly from the ToS, but a Twitter support page which serves to clarify the part of the ToS which states this.
Yes but NBC are social media bullies, what next there communications officer calling all people who complain names, oh wait no that already happened.
This is the same NBC that cancelled Star Trek, they clearly have not learned how to handle social interactions and feedback still from there customers and potentual customers.
Which is extremely disturbing because it is not a private email address.
It's a corporate business address, which makes it as socially acceptable as "send all your complaints to NBC c/o Gary Zenkel", and not against Twitter's policy.
Why is that not a private email address? Just because I have a corporate email address, that doesn't mean I expect random fan mail or people I don't know emailing me complaints/whatever. Twitter received a complaint from NBC, and according to the Terms of Service, the account had to be suspended. Obviously this backfired, but that's not the point.
This appears to be true. If it is, coupled with all of the other crazy Olympics Twitter snafus, Twitter is pretty much dead to me. I only use it to follow the ~20-30 obscure Internet celebrities that I care about, and for that it was useful, but it's not worth associating with such a scatterbrained company.
For every "social media is changing our world" moment that pops up every few months there are 12,460,000,000 worthless tweets clogging up the other 89 days.
It seems to me that the primary use of the service is to provide an IV drip of useless information for update addicted. The "great" moments are purely incidental.
Isn't that life, though? Truly great moments in life are few and far between, but we live through the dull moments in order to see the great moments. Yeah twitter is mostly useless, but the times when it's not useless outshine the times when it is useless.
What is really the use? I don't have an interest in killing time with it, so if there is a real use maybe I can take advantage of that in a more focused way without continuously sampling from an endless stream of drivel.
I use twitter heavily in the info sec world, mainly to keep abreast of new developments. There are always new hacks and exploits coming out, and they get posted on twitter first.
The trick is to follow your interests. If you don't care about world news, NASCAR, or celebrities, don't follow them.
Twitter itself really offers nothing unique in this regard. The same effects could be had with tons of other online services.
While Twitter is the current market leader (imo mostly due to constant hyping by mainstream media who apparently feel "tweet" is of analogous magnitude as "email"), it could easily be replaced by any number of extant services, let alone potential future services.
it could easily be replaced by any number of extant services, let alone potential future services.
Does this matter at all? Everything could be replaced by another service. Nothing is sacred. But what really matters isn't what will come, but what exists. Twitter exists. That's why it's used. I'm really not seeing your point.
The point is the triviality of a Twitter clone and the lack of any significant unique contribution that is difficult to copy. Right now, ALL they have is their marketshare.
Google has competitors, but they can't just upset Google overnight because it is really hard and takes a really long time to build a search facility of equivalent utility to the one Google provides. While some people challenge them, Google is still the objective king in searches, and companies with a huge amount of resources, like Microsoft, struggle to supplant Google in the quality of their offering.
Facebook is a very complex system with a lot of support for a lot of different things. Facebook is more in line with Twitter in that it's strongly dependent on network effects, but Facebook requires investment of significant time in building relationships and composing a profile; they have some reasonable sense of lock-in here. And if you've looked around, it is still difficult to develop a platform that does everything Facebook does (or more), especially with Facebook's rapid deployment of analogous features anytime a competitor tries to one-up them. They copied and thereby neutered the viability of Circles lickety-split and Google+ could no longer claim a significant feature advantage for those concerned about privacy.
Twitter is just a stream of short strings, easily scrapeable and convertible. The site can be cloned on a conceptual level in a couple of days. Twitter may have done some serious scaling work, but in the end they have no unique offering, no killer feature, nothing that a normal developer would have difficulty or serious effort duplicating at the conceptual level. Scalability of course takes time, but it's highly implementation dependent and occurs as necessary; Twitter's internal performance is not a serious user-facing barrier or feature. In fact, Facebook and Google+ already include all the functionality of Twitter.
There is no reason to stay on Twitter other than pure network effects.
More along the lines of Twitter's original beauty was it provided an unbiased, unfiltered access to all information from the Internet, and their recent behaviour indicates that beauty is no longer there.
Given the massive role Twitter played in Egypt's protests, I wonder if such a thing would still be possible given Twitter's current corporate philosophy. And the fact that I even have to wonder that, now, is why we're blaming Twitter.
Sad to see Twitter becoming one of these companies who easily bow to corporate/government intimidation. Always thought Twitter was one of the good guys. Very disappointing but fortunately this is becoming a "story". Let's see what kind of damage control they are trying to pull off.
It is sad to see twitter becoming yet another ad bloated cyclopean monstrosity desperately trying to fleece it's users before they flee for greener pastures.
I've been quite fond of it over the years, but if it starts engaging in vindictive censorship; then it becomes a poisoned well and can no longer be trusted.
45 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 99.9 ms ] threadThere is no way you can go the media company route (vs. the api/infrastructure route) and not get this conflict.
It'd be better to take a look at things like status.net, or more low level solutions such as http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/25/anOpenTwitterlikeEco....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/30/us-twitter-nbc-jou...
I was under the impression that non-business e-mails, phone numbers and addresses were considered private, but anything related to a business was fair game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corp._v._Hamidi
I think it's arguable whether his work address is "personal information" or not.
EDIT LoganCale points out that I am wrong. He's right.
"If information was previously posted or displayed elsewhere on the Internet prior to being put on Twitter, it is not a violation of this policy."
It's an email owned by a public company, that's about as public as you get.
* This is actually not directly from the ToS, but a Twitter support page which serves to clarify the part of the ToS which states this.
This is the same NBC that cancelled Star Trek, they clearly have not learned how to handle social interactions and feedback still from there customers and potentual customers.
It's a corporate business address, which makes it as socially acceptable as "send all your complaints to NBC c/o Gary Zenkel", and not against Twitter's policy.
Wait, what? Social media didn't exist in 2008?
For every "social media is changing our world" moment that pops up every few months there are 12,460,000,000 worthless tweets clogging up the other 89 days.
It seems to me that the primary use of the service is to provide an IV drip of useless information for update addicted. The "great" moments are purely incidental.
The trick is to follow your interests. If you don't care about world news, NASCAR, or celebrities, don't follow them.
While Twitter is the current market leader (imo mostly due to constant hyping by mainstream media who apparently feel "tweet" is of analogous magnitude as "email"), it could easily be replaced by any number of extant services, let alone potential future services.
Does this matter at all? Everything could be replaced by another service. Nothing is sacred. But what really matters isn't what will come, but what exists. Twitter exists. That's why it's used. I'm really not seeing your point.
Google has competitors, but they can't just upset Google overnight because it is really hard and takes a really long time to build a search facility of equivalent utility to the one Google provides. While some people challenge them, Google is still the objective king in searches, and companies with a huge amount of resources, like Microsoft, struggle to supplant Google in the quality of their offering.
Facebook is a very complex system with a lot of support for a lot of different things. Facebook is more in line with Twitter in that it's strongly dependent on network effects, but Facebook requires investment of significant time in building relationships and composing a profile; they have some reasonable sense of lock-in here. And if you've looked around, it is still difficult to develop a platform that does everything Facebook does (or more), especially with Facebook's rapid deployment of analogous features anytime a competitor tries to one-up them. They copied and thereby neutered the viability of Circles lickety-split and Google+ could no longer claim a significant feature advantage for those concerned about privacy.
Twitter is just a stream of short strings, easily scrapeable and convertible. The site can be cloned on a conceptual level in a couple of days. Twitter may have done some serious scaling work, but in the end they have no unique offering, no killer feature, nothing that a normal developer would have difficulty or serious effort duplicating at the conceptual level. Scalability of course takes time, but it's highly implementation dependent and occurs as necessary; Twitter's internal performance is not a serious user-facing barrier or feature. In fact, Facebook and Google+ already include all the functionality of Twitter.
There is no reason to stay on Twitter other than pure network effects.
Given the massive role Twitter played in Egypt's protests, I wonder if such a thing would still be possible given Twitter's current corporate philosophy. And the fact that I even have to wonder that, now, is why we're blaming Twitter.
[0] Twitter to selectively 'censor' tweets by country. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16753729
I've been quite fond of it over the years, but if it starts engaging in vindictive censorship; then it becomes a poisoned well and can no longer be trusted.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/?tab=wX#110741260330832413403/po...
-- No email address's were hurt during this post.