Changes are on the way to the privacy policy at Twitter/X—and they’re pretty major.
The Elon Musk–led social media company has alerted users that effective Nov. 15, user data can be used to train AI models for third-party “collaborators.” That would seemingly extend beyond Musk’s own Grok AI and let the company license data to outside companies, much as Reddit does.
That could become a substantial revenue stream for the company, which has seen its advertising income tumble since Musk’s takeover. The policy update does say users have the ability to opt out, but does not make it clear how to do so at this time.
“Depending on your settings, or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties,” the update reads. “If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in X’s Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise.”
Should users have a problem with this (or anything else to do with Twitter/X) after the changes go into effect, they’ll only have one venue to plead their case: the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas.
That’s unusual for a few reasons. First, the company is not located in that county. It’s headquartered 218 miles south in Bastrop, near Austin, following its move from San Francisco. Also, the judges in the U.S. District Court in that county were appointed by George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The county frequently sides with conservative parties in cases, whereas the district Twitter/X calls home has fewer Republican-appointed judges.
Musk has become a super-donor to Trump and the Republican Party, giving $75 million to his America PAC, a political action committee working to see that Trump is elected president in November.
Twitter/X is also setting up protections to protect against data scrapers. Any user caught viewing or accessing over 1 million posts per day will be fined $15,000 per million, the company said.