Stolen: the app that lets you trade people is a privacy minefield

A new kind of digital violation is hitting Twitter users, who can now be 'owned' and traded with virtual money

Here is an idea for a fun game. Imagine playing with online trading cards, where you're buying and selling virtual people. Like baseball cards - remember those? Except instead of baseball players, they're real people, pulled from real people's Twitter accounts. Like yours! If you use Twitter, some player might be buying and selling you right now, without your knowledge or permission. And if they "own" you, they can write anything they want on your "trading card". Sounds fun, right?

Actually, it sounds mega gross. But that's the basic idea behind Stolen, a brand-new app by a company called Hey, Inc. that promises to let you "collect and trade your favorite people on Twitter!" Essentially, the app crunches all kinds of publiclyavailable data about your Twitter account to assign you a monetary value in pretend money which the game calls "social currency", and then other users can spend virtual money to become your "owner". Your value will continue to depend on how many people are competing to buy you in a constantly-fluctuating market, and, of course, you cannot be the owner of your own account.