In August last year, Michael Veale, a researcher at the University College London discovered that social media giant Twitter was collecting metadata from the links shortener it uses when Twitter users include certain URLs in their respective tweets.
Mr. Veale, who is on the advisory council of the Open Rights Group and a freelance consultant to European Commissions AI Strategy’s Algorithm Awareness Project, immediately filed a complaint with the Irish data watchdog saying that Twitter’s latest activities were causing privacy concerns and were negatively intersecting the European data protection laws.
On Thursday last week, The Irish Data Protection Commissioner(DPC) disclosed to the world on an official note that an investigation has been launched for the allegations made by an individual and Twitter is also responding on a positive note to the breach notification since January this month.
The inquiry is said to investigate the claims made by the researcher and also is going to focus on the standards being practiced by Twitter when complying with Article 33 of the GDPR.
Twitter disclosed that it is committed to working with the DPC on the issue and will also try to explain to the watchdog on how it adhering to article 33 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
Note 1- Under the new GDPR which kicked in May last year, any company found breaking privacy laws will be subjected to a fine of 4% on its global revenue or 20 million Euros whichever is higher, as opposed to few hundred thousands Euros on a previous note.
Note 2- Irish data watchdog has been investigating the social media giant since Nov’18 for a number of data breaches which took place after the introduction of the GDPR.
