New lawsuit claims Twitter is 'eavesdropping' on users' direct messages

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A picture illustration shows Twitter's logo reflected in a person's eye, in central Bosnian town of Zenica, March 13, 2015. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

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Twitter was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit on Monday that claims its automatic link-shortening in direct messages amounts to wiretapping.

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"Twitter surreptitiously eavesdrops on its users' private Direct Message communications," the complaint reads. "As soon as a user sends a Direct Message, Twitter intercepts, reads, and, at times, even alters the message."

The complaint was brought in federal court in San Francisco from Wilford Rane, as The Hollywood Reporter uncovered.

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The suit alleges that Twitter's algorithms modify links sent through its direct message service. The suit uses a New York Times article as an example, which had its link modified to ""http:/t.co/CL2SKBxr1s" - though it still showed "www.nytimes.com" to the user. This, the suit argues, is deceptive.

The lawsuit claims that, by using this link-shortening mechanism, Twitter passes data to its analytics servers before sending users to the linked site. This allegedly allows them to benefit from higher advertising rates, according to the suit.

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Bear in mind that this is merely a proposed class action, and has not been approved by a judge. The claimed damages run up to $100 per day for each user of two classes: those who received direct messages and those who sent them.

A similar class action against Google, which alleged that the company was combing through Gmail accounts for advertising purposes, was derailed when a judge ruled that the users were too dissimilar to make up a class.

Facebook was also smacked with a similar suit last year, which alleged it used data from private messages to target ads.

Read the full complaint here.

Business Insider has reached out to Twitter for comment.

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