Dutch X users should assume that their tweets have been collected by the government in the past. That’s what a business aggregator working for the government says in a study by AG Connect. It is difficult to request this data from citizens.

AG Connect He conducted research in cooperation with the Ministry of Interior and Administration of the behavior of the X-group of Dutch governments. The site has made GDPR access requests to governments, as well as to companies that use it to analyze tweets. These are companies like OBI4wan and Cousto. The CEO and CTO of that first company, AG Connect, points out that data was collected from many users of X, the former Twitter user. “You can assume that every Dutch-speaking Twitter user is somewhere in our ‘box.’ If you tweet about Dutch topics, the tweets will likely be collected from you.”

According to AG Connect, it is also difficult for citizens to know what happens to that data. For example, the two companies indicated the tweets they collected, but did not specify which companies or governments they were delivered or sold to. Users are also not effectively informed if their data is collected in this way, while this is mandatory under the GDPR. This is partly because too much data is collected. For example, OBI4wan says that X does not allow users to be approached automatically. “[Daarom] It is technically impossible to inform them of every tweet collected. “You can read about it in the terms of use,” the company says.

Last year it turned out A previous study conducted by AG Connect al The government collects thousands of tweets from citizens. This is done, for example, for research or to find out “how politics affects citizens”. In 2021, the Netherlands’ National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism and Security was also found to have analyzed public tweets of citizens via fake accounts.