Tip of the Week: Concerned About Privacy? Adjust These 3 Settings to Your Twitter Account

As per usual in the world of websites and online services, Twitter has updated its privacy policy. However, this comes with the unfortunate side-effect of the web service providing its users’ information to advertisers. While this might sound inconvenient, we’ll walk you through some steps that you can take to enhance your privacy in lieu of this change.

There are three major changes to Twitter’s privacy policy that you’ll want to consider, especially if your employees or your organization take advantage of Twitter for any reason. These changes are:

• Web data is stored longer: Twitter can use cookies to store information about you whenever you visit a site that has an embedded tweet and/or a share button on it. Previously, this data would only be stored for 10 days, but as of June 18th, this will increase to 30 days.
• There is more data sharing: The official privacy policy of Twitter states the following: “"We've updated how we share non-personal, aggregated and device-level data, including through some select partnership agreements that allow the data to be linked to your name, email, or other personal information -- but only when you give your consent to those partners." Basically, Twitter now shares data that can be linked to your name, email, and other information, with advertisers--we mean, “partners.”
• There is no more Do Not Track feature: If your web browser has the feature to turn on Do Not Track, Twitter no longer supports this. Twitter states that there was previously support for such a feature, but the industry standard that it was looking for was not implemented. In other words, this industry standard approach to Do Not Track never appeared, so it sees no reason to support it any longer.

Even though the change doesn’t happen for a while, you’ll still want to take advantage of this time to make the requisite changes to your account settings. This helps you avoid forgetting about them in the future. To change these settings, go to Settings > Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Personalization and data. At the top of this page, click the slider that says Disable all. You’ll have to do the same thing for the mobile application.

Furthermore, if you’re just curious to see how your data is being used, you can see this in Twitter’s settings. If you’re using the app, just scroll down to the bottom of the Personalization and data page to find the See your Twitter data option. While you can view or edit your profile, the most interesting data will be found in Your Data. This shows what Twitter assumes about you, and you can even edit them to ensure that Twitter doesn’t lump you in with groups that you’re not particularly fond of, like putting pineapple on pizza. The most interesting part of this is that you can even have Twitter send you a list of the advertisers with whom they’ve shared your information.

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