this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, most are bots that don't care about their data. Still, sucks for those, I guess, 5 human users.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

S/humans/suckers

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Grok AI is going through its rebellious phase

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Grok don't like being meddled with. Touch my personality, will you?

[–] nz_fish 34 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

There's 2.8 billion twitter users?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago

I’ve barely ever used twitter but have like 4 accounts to my name over the past 15 years. I kept on forgetting I had already made an account.

Now imagine all the alts and bots and specific accounts people create for projects. Probably much less than 2.8 billion humans have created a twitter account. But 2.8 billion accounts have been created.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

As of Jan 2025, X (formerly Twitter) had around 335.7 million users so how is it possible that data from 2.8 billion users has been leaked?

One possible explanation is that the dataset includes aggregated or historical data, such as bot accounts that were created and later banned, inactive or deleted accounts that still lingered in historical records, or old data that was merged with newer data, increasing the total number of records.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It’s also possible that it includes ghost accounts, for people who have been tracked but never made an account. All of those “Share to [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc]” social media buttons that you see on web pages are tracking your activity, even if you don’t have an account with the social media platform. The company 100% has you fingerprinted and tied to a ghost accounts, and is tracking your browsing habits via those buttons. Then if you ever make an account, they simply tie the previously collected tracking data from the ghost account to the new account.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This sound so illegal. Like I don't doubt it, it just sounds like it should be illegal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

That’s because it’s immoral, but not illegal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Accounts. They always had a huge bot problem.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That registered at some point sure. Users sure, individuals less so

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Don't forget bots

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

it's been around for more than 15 years; it's not out of the question.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

....so I can get all the Pussy in Bio in one place now?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh no. The stuff I put out there for everyone to see is now...out there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah sounds like they could’ve just scraped that tbh?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Truly hope this leads to doxxing for anyone and everyone who has paid for the blue checkmark