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Twitter plans to record all links clicked
function. And Google sometimes, but not always, seems to use redirects to track links clicked on from its home page (here's how to do this yourself).
Knowing what links are popular can help a sufficiently sophisticated Web site refine its recommendations, and likely will let Twitter improve its "promoted tweets" program and its resonance algorithm, which uses metrics like number-of-clicks to decide which messages are relevant and useful.
It can also, as Twitter's Sean Garrett pointed out in June, permit better detection and prevention of malicious links.
So beyond the it-feels-a-bit-creepy, what's the real privacy concern? It's this: a security breach at a Twitter data center could reveal who's clicking on what links (although any theoretical breach would probably reveal much more sensitive information too). Police armed with search warrants in criminal investigations may have link-clicking questions they want answered. Divorce attorneys armed with subpoenas won't be far behind. And, in general, users may not expect this data about their behavior to be stored forever.
It's true that plenty of other link-shortening services exist, including tinyurl.com, bit.ly, is.gd, and snipurl.com. But once every Twitter user is switched over to t.co, it becomes a central information repository and a more alluring source of who-clicked-what data.
One obvious way to alleviate any privacy worries would be for Twitter to offer an option to disable logging and to delete any previously stored records. Log anonymization after a certain time wouldn't hurt either. Alex Macgillivray, are you reading this?
via news.cnet.com
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