Twitter Update Prevents you From Opting-out of your Data being shared with Advertisers

Twitter is making your experience with their app a little less private. The social media platform announced on April 8th that they are removing a privacy setting that allowed users to determine whether their data would be shared with third-party advertisers. Twitter clarified in a notification sent to its users that the move was being made to help twitter continue to operate as a “free service”.

Before the update to the social media platform, users were given the option to “Share your data with Twitter’s business partners”.  This privacy option allowed a user to opt-out of Twitter sharing information with their partners such as your phone’s tracking identifier, or ads you interacted with. Now, unless you live in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association, and the United Kingdom, the option to opt-out has been removed.

The notification Twitter sent its users read, “The control you have over what information Twitter shares with its business partners has changed. Specifically, your ability to control mobile app advertising measurements has been removed, but you can control whether to share some non-public data to improve Twitter’s marketing activities on other sites and apps. These changes, which help Twitter to continue operating as a free service, are reflected now in your settings.”

Twitter is not releasing any of your personal information such as your name, email, phone number or username.

Users will still have the ability to keep non-public data private. To do this, users should navigate to Settings > Privacy & Safety > Personalization & Data, and toggle off the “Allow additional information sharing with business partners” option.

“We’re updating a data-sharing setting that relates to sharing additional information with business partners, specifically to measure the effectiveness of mobile app ads on Twitter. This is part of our ongoing work around transparency and control. We want to ensure that people understand the settings we provide, what they do, and how to use them,” a Twitter spokesperson said.

Story via Digital Trends