Part 3 of Project Veritas’ undercover expose of Twitter features employees talking casually about how they can view your private messages. Like other media giants, Twitter makes the bulk of its money by using your data — including data from your private messages — to create a “virtual profile” for advertisers who pay a premium for such information.
“I get to look at all of the reported tweets,” senior network security engineer Clay Haynes told a female Project Veritas journalist over dinner. “Which means I’ve seen a lot of dick pics.” Haynes explained that there are “teams” employed by Twitter to look at such pictures. “I mean, we’re talking, we’re talking three or four … at least, three or four hundred people … Yes, they’re paid to look at d*** pics,” Haynes told Project Veritas. “It is a creepy Big Brother,” he added. “It’s like a level. … I don’t want to say it freaks me out, but it disturbs me.”
Haynes talked more about his access to “intimate photos” in a subsequent meeting on January 6, which also included Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, returning in his undercover role.
“I’ve seen way more penises than I’ve ever wanted to see in my life,” Haynes told Project Veritas. “That’s, yeah. … You know, actually. … This sounds horrible, but I’m actually glad and fortunate it’s just dicks, it’s just blow job pictures, it’s just that type of stuff.”
Asked if these types of pictures could leak from Twitter, he answered: “Oh yeah, and it’s a genie out of the bottle kind of thing after that point. You know? Sure, I can fire them. Heck, I could probably even sue them, in some cases. But, the genie’s already out of the bottle. Like, how do actually recoup costs … you can’t calculate the cost or the damage of that.”
Three other Twitter software engineers, Conrado Miranda, Pranay Singh, and Mihai Alexandru Florea, had more to say about Twitter’s “creepy Big Brother” practices in separate meetings with Project Veritas.
Singh, a direct messaging engineer for Twitter, told the undercover journalist over drinks on January 5, 2018: “Everything you send is stored on my server. So all your sex messages and you, like, d*** pics are on my server now.”
He added: “All your illegitimate wives and, like, all the girls you’ve been f***ing around with, they’re on my server now. … I’m going to send it to your wife, she’s going use it in your divorce. So, what happens is like, you like, write something or post pictures on line, they never go away. … Because even after you send them, people are like analyzing them, to see what you are interested in, to see what you are talking about. And they sell that data.”
Twitter software engineer Mihai Florea explained how it works: “To actually charge the advertisers the money, we have to prove it was you,” he said. “And that’s why using [sic] email address, or like a cookie or something that can track you.” Florea added, “You’re paying for the right to use our website with your data basically.”
Everyone who visits Twitter gets their data mined — even those without Twitter accounts, according to former Twitter software engineer Conrado Miranda: “You leak way more information than you think. Like, we have information from people — like, if you go to Twitter for the first time, we have information about you,” he told Project Veritas.
Asked if there was a way to protect people from having their private information fall into the wrong hands, Miranda said, “you don’t … there is no way.”
“Twitter is aggressively harvesting your personal information and tracking your every movement, selling your virtual dossier to the highest bidder,” Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe said. “Even more alarming is that these Twitter employees don’t seem to think that they are the ‘biggest brother’ out there. … We have more to come — stay tuned.”
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