Twitter spam and illicit profiling

Not a mobile thingy I suppose, but still quite interesting.

Today I got my first piece of Twitter spam. A girl whom I’d never heard of starting following me. Now I think it’s fair to say I know or know of most of the people who follow me – it’s a pretty small industry. So I clicked through to read one of her tweets, got a slightly surreal but not implausible message, and a link. Click link. Get porn.

Wow. I then looked up Twitter spam, and I can see that it is a problem. There are loads of sites out there trying to get it stopped. I just don’t use Twitter enough, I suppose. But I’ve never heard anybody else talking about it. Does this mean that people don’t even notice when malevolent strangers are asking to become their friends? Does this mean that they don’t know who is following what they do?

The trouble is, being a follower on Twitter has the potential to be such an effective tool for profiling. Yes you have to look quite hard to become followers in the first place, and then you have to do some trawling to work out what people are in to etc, but with the right datamining and searches of Twitter you could get a reasonable cross section of the public to reveal just about everything that interests them, allowing for some pretty precise demographics.

And it’s all just out there, waiting for the right devious mind to write the software to be able to read it. If they haven’t already.

If you include the image sites where people put up everything that interests them, then you could find out employment details, holiday preferences, when people go to the loo, their dog’s name, when they are out…

In fact, never mind illicit consumer data mining, what about burglars?