The researcher that is front and center in the Facebook data scandal was buying data on Twitter users, as well.
The Sydney Morning Herald broke the story over the weekend:
"Researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who created tools that allowed a political consultancy to psychologically profile and target voters, bought the data from the microblogging website in 2015, before the recent scandal came to light.
Dr. Kogan bought tweets, usernames, photos, profile pictures and location data from Twitter over a five-month period between December 2014 and April 2015 through his company Global Science Research (GSR)."
Twitter, for its part, says no private information was sold.
This raises a privacy question: Are you okay with your public profile information being sold, in bulk, to anyone who wants to profile you? How do you feel about companies being able to buy your picture as part of a data sale?