Stolen is an app that let you buy and sell people’s Twitter accounts — not access to the accounts, just a kind of bogus claim to ownership — in a play marketplace. With no opt-in or grant of permission. The developers seem to have been thinking “trading cards,” but that’s not what it felt like, and people began sounding the alarm very quickly.
Holly Brockwell of Gadgette interviewed Siqi Chen, CEO of the company behind the app, during its brief, two-week run; Stolen is now shut down.
We don’t say, ‘Oh, I own you now,’ like, that’s not in the app. That’s not a thing that we want to do. It’s gross.
Well, it is in the app at the moment, because obviously it says, ‘You own this person now. This person belongs to you.’
We don’t say that. We’re just saying, like, ‘This card belongs to you.’ That’s the intention of it right now.
I’m looking at the screen right now. It says, ‘Boom, Holly Brockwell belongs to you now.’ That’s not a card, that’s me as a person.
Yes. That- we need to fix that.
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