Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Twitter’s Ex-Employee Raises The Curtain On The ‘Most Unethical’ Thing He Was Told To Do

Elon Musk taking charge meant bad news for so many members of Twitter’s workforce. The goal was to bring the workforce down by 75% and right now, they’ve managed to reduce it by half.

That’s a major firing spree if you ask us but what’s even more shocking is linked to how some of those given the boot are now being rehired and asked to return. So as you can see, so many questions are in people’s minds about what has taken place and what the future holds.

But now, an ex-employee of the app is shedding light on how he was asked to do the most unethical thing for the platform. His name is Steve Krenzel and his claims are definitely eyebrow-raising.

The incident in question has to do with something that took place between the years 2015 to 2016. And now that the ownership has changed, he is opening his mouth on an act that he simply can’t get over because that’s how bad it was.

Thankfully, the task given wasn’t exactly by Twitter but by those representatives arising from a large telecom company. He was asked to track the moment users left the house, left for their work, and also anywhere they wanted to go.

Krenzel mentioned how he was famous as the mobile guy as he was always trying to search for ways to better the Twitter app on smart devices. So his goal was to enhance uploaded logs as the platform logs all things that users did such as delay, swipe, edit, and more.

A lot of apps do this for purposes like debugging, trials, and even for the sake of metrics. But it’s never being done to sell off data to other third parties out there. But being pulled into a shocking conversation by the sales team to fulfill this request of tracking users really opened up his eyes and his mind.

He was asked by the giant telecom firm to give data in return for payments. The tracking was for users based in North America and he was just too shocked at what was going on. Certainly, it was a suspicious request and they wanted to see how many of the app’s users were entering stores belonging to archrivals.

Keeping a track of users’ daily schedules was never something that he wanted to do. It’s like behaving like a spy and invading their privacy. At that, CEO Jack Dorsey disapproved and so did he because it was absurd. There was no way he planned on selling details of users’ location data.

But what about Elon Musk? Would the billionaire be ready to use that data for his own gains? Well, we can’t say for sure but Krenzel fears the new Twitter owner might plan on doing things that were far worse than just that.

Certainly, this was an eye-opener for us about how the concerns of watchdogs in today’s time hold true for obvious reasons.


Read next: Twitter Says Its New Verification Scheme Will Include Three Accounts With Official, Paid, And Unlabeled Tags
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

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