Elon Musk’s takeover meant bad news for so many members of Twitter’s workforce. The goal was to reduce the workforce by 75% and now, they have managed to reduce it by half.
That’s one hell of a shooting spree if you ask us, but what’s even more shocking relates to how some of those who were given the boot are now being reworked and asked to return. So, as you can see, so many questions are on people’s minds about what has happened and what the future holds.
But now, a former 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 certainly fascinating.
The event in question is about something that happened between 2015-2016. And now that ownership has changed, he’s opening his mouth about an act he just can’t get over how bad it was.
Fortunately, the task given was not exactly from Twitter, but from those representatives of a large telecom company. It was asked to track the moment when users left home, left for their work and also wherever they wanted to go.
Krenzel mentioned how he was famous as the mobile guy as he was always trying to find ways to improve the Twitter app on smart devices. So his goal was to improve the upload logs as the platform records all the things that users did like delay, swipe, edit and more.
To set the scene, this was the 2015-2016 era. @dickc just crashed though he was great and made us feel like family. @jack came in as part-time CEO. Twitter had been dying for a while and was desperately trying to find a buyer. Facebook and Google both declined.
— Steve Krenzel (@stevekrenzel) November 7, 2022
Many applications do this for purposes such as debugging, testing, and even for the sake of metrics. But it has never been done to sell the data to other third parties out there. But being dragged into a harrowing conversation by the sales team to fulfill this user tracking requirement really opened his eyes and mind.
He was asked by the giant telecom firm to provide data in exchange for payments. The tracking was for users based in North America and he was very shocked by what was happening. Of course, it was a questionable request, and they wanted to see how many of the app’s users were visiting rival stores.
Keeping track of users’ daily schedules was never something he wanted to do. It’s like acting like a spy and invading their privacy. With that, CEO Jack Dorsey disapproved and neither did he, because it was absurd. There was no way he was planning to sell the details of users’ location data.
But what about Elon Musk? Would the billionaire be willing to use that data for his own gain? Well, we can’t say for sure, but Krenzel fears that Twitter’s new owner might be planning to do things that were far worse than that.
Of course, this opened our eyes to how the concerns of watchdogs in this day and age are real for obvious reasons.
Read more: Twitter says its new verification scheme will include three accounts with official, paid and untagged tags
