Jack Dorsey on why Twitter's no Facebook when it comes to data
- Summary:
- Twitter's Jack Dorsey was the latest of the big social media CEOs to face public scrutiny around his firm's privacy policies.
It’s been quite the week for the three companies most at the center of the recent data privacy storm - Facebook, Alphabet (parent to Google) and Twitter. All three have turned in quarterly numbers and seen their CEOs face up to public scrutiny from the Wall Street analyst community.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was first up and managed to (nearly) ignore the elephant in the room, assisted by indifferent questioning. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg got a mild grilling, with his COO Sheryl Sandberg muddying the waters around how the firm intends to roll out GDPR (General Data Protection Policy) protections worldwide.
That just leaves Twitter, with CEO Jack Dorsey’s approach to the wider data privacy debate following a similar line of argument to that of his Facebook counterpart - lots of reassuring statements on how seriously he takes the issue, but with some ‘look at the good stuff we do’ tagged on for good measure.
So the party line was:
We believe that privacy is a fundamental right for everyone we serve on our service. Our data business is something we continue to feel really good about. We are different from our peers in that Twitter is public and we serve the public conversation, so all of our data is out in the public, out in the open.
He made the pitch that Twitter’s data business is different to that of Facebook or Google in that it just organizes public data in real-time to make it easier for brands, researchers and organizations to utilize it. He cited some exemplars to back up his claim:
To add some color here, we do a lot of sentiment analysis for brands for them to figure out how people feel about their products or services. We see a lot of citizen services being used. A good example of this is Virginia. Their Department of Emergency provides citizen info for the residents. And also research. We see a lot of research. A good example of this is Northeastern who developed a flu tracking technique.
We do not provide any personal, identifiable information that's not already visible on the service. So, we feel really good around the data business, especially with all the conversations going on. And we will continue to hold ourselves publicly accountable to make sure that we fulfill that fundamental right of privacy.
All of that means, he insisted, that there’s not a like-for-life comparison that can be made between Twitter and Facebook et al:
Our data business is a little bit different from our peers in that we organize the public information so that people can gauge insights from them. Normally, this is used for brands, sentiment analysis for citizen services, governments, local governments in particular and researchers. And we have a Know Your Customer policy, so that we do extensive research in terms of who is our customer around the data. But, again, a lot of the data is in the public and we do not sell any personal identifiable information.
The ‘good works’ angle was reiterated as Dorsey went on to argue;
Over the past two years, we've really focused on, number one, identifying our core job and then, number two, building against it and that core job is keeping people informed. So the more we lean into that and the more we make sure that we're building products against that and services against that, the better we do.
We have always benefited as a service from having journalists on our service, and one of our most important constituents are journalists. They certainly release all their publications and articles, but also carry through the conversation use Twitter as a source.
People naturally see Twitter as a place to figure out what's going on and what's happening within the world. Again, with global news, with local news, with anything newsworthy around a particular topic or an interest. And we do believe it is our core job to keep people informed against that.
GDPR policies
Dorsey also pointed to new terms of service that will update Twitter’s privacy policies from 25 May, the date that GDPR comes into force. These will apply globally - none of the Facebook ‘ifs, buts and maybes’ on public view here, although there is a burden of responsibility on users to manage their own privacy protections. According to a statement from Damien Kieran, Global Data Protection Officer at Twitter:
We've updated our Privacy Policy to make it visually clear and easy to use. You`ll see a download button at the top of the page that allows you to get a plain text version if you prefer. It's optimised for both mobile and web…We believe you should know the types of data you share with us and how we use it. Most importantly, you should have meaningful control over both.
If you’re in the European Union on 25 May, when you log in a prompt will appear to explain that the terms of service have changed, Keiran explained:
We'll also show you a simple chart that categorizes the legal basis for the personal data we process. You`ll then be brought to your individual Settings and Privacy section, where we will ask you to review your key current settings. You can leave them all as they are, modify each, and learn more about any of the individual settings before making a change - the choice is entirely in your hands.
If you’re not in the EU, you can still have the same protections, he added:
Everyone around the world can use the controls we highlight to limit the information we collect about you or how we use it, and change the settings at any time.
The big question around GDPR that remains unanswered to date is how and to what extent will its restrictions hit the bottom line for social media firms. Chief Financial Offer Ned Segal could provide no clear guidance here, offering only:
GDPR could have some impact over time.
My take
Twitter’s not attracted the same level of controversy as Facebook which sits stuck in the eye of the data privacy storm. Dorsey made a reasonable stand this week. He certainly didn’t make the situation any worse and was able to point to a proactive push on updating policies ahead of GDPR. Whether the firm can ‘keep its head down’ long term is a moot point. The European Commission, for example, is taking a lot of interest in data flows between Twitter and WhatsApp.