Updates to Twitter’s Privacy Policy ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

X’s recently updated privacy policy informed its users it would now collect biometric data as well as users’ job and education history, Bloomberg spotted earlier this week. But it appears that’s not the only thing that X plans to do with user data. According to an update to another section of the policy, the company additionally plans to use the information it collects and other publicly available information to help train its machine learning and AI models, it says.

It seems extraordinary to me that services can decide to change their entire raison d’être and longtime users have barely three choices: accept the new contract, make their account private, or delete their account.

In this case, the management running the slowly decaying corpse of Twitter has decided to go all-in on machine learning as part of the company’s new strategy to do everything, all of the time. For seventeen years, users have posted little messages — most of them public — which the company can now mine as fuel for what it hopes is its future. You did not think that was what you were agreeing to when you tweeted that funny thing your kid did ten years ago, but that is now part of the reservoir for the new big thing.