20201019 ML Brief
What you should know about Twitter’s latest privacy policy update
When you visit a site that features a tweet button or an embedded tweet, Twitter is able to recognize that you’re on that site and use that information to target you with ads. And now it’s going to hang onto that information for a bit longer but give you more control over it.
Twitter updated its privacy policy on Wednesday so that it can use the information it collects about people’s off-Twitter web browsing for up to 30 days, as opposed to the previous 10-day maximum, according to the updated document that takes effect on June 18. The extension could help Twitter when it comes to making sure its ads are aimed at enough of the right people, which could aid its struggle to attract direct-response advertisers and reverse its advertising revenue declines.
Coinciding with the update, Twitter has also added a new section to the settings menu on its site and in its mobile apps that details the information Twitter uses to target a person with ads and lets that person deselect individual interest categories and request a list of the companies that use Twitter’s Tailored Audiences option to target them with ads based on information like their email address, Twitter handle or whether they visited the advertiser’s site or used its mobile app.
At the same time Twitter is giving people more control over how they are targeted, it is removing support for Do Not Track, which people can use to ask every website they visit not to track their behavior in order to target them with ads. Twitter made a big deal about supporting Do Not Track in May 2012, so its reversal is a surprise — unless you’ve been following the wave of major ad-supported digital platforms opting to ignore Do Not Track requests. When Hulu announced last July that it would no longer support Do Not Track, it joined nine other major digital platforms that do not respond to these opt-out requests. Now Twitter has joined that list.
Twitter explained its change in position in an update to the Do Not Track entry on its help site. “While we had hoped that our support for Do Not Track would spur industry adoption, an industry-standard approach to Do Not Track did not materialize,” according to the company.
That’s pretty much the same reason that Hulu, Facebook, Google and others have cited for not supporting Do Not Track, though the standard is slated to become an official recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in August 2017.
While Twitter will no longer support Do Not Track once its new privacy policy takes effect on June 18, the company still offers options for people to disable ads targeted based information collected off Twitter. People can pull up Twitter’s settings menu, select “Privacy and Safety,” then “Personalization and data,” and then toggle off “Personalize ads.” That menu also includes an option to disable Twitter from being able to see when a person visits a site that features a tweet button or an embedded tweet, as well as a nuclear option that also prevents Twitter from sharing a person’s data with other companies, using location-based data to personalize content on Twitter and connecting data across the different devices a person may use to log in to Twitter.
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