Technology

Twitter lets users know that it now shares more data with advertisers

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Census searches on Twitter will redirect users to official links, but are unlikely to stop hoaxes

Twitter removed a privacy feature that allowed all users to stop sharing certain private information with advertisers. The institution prevented Twitter from sharing information such as the ads you saw or interacted with and the tracking ID for your phone. For most users, that information is now shared by default and cannot be turned off.

The shared data is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of advertisements on Twitter, the company says. It helps Twitter prove that people actually view, interact with, and otherwise see the ads advertisers pay for, helping the company to “ continue to operate as a free service. ”

An option in Privacy settings of Twitter called “Share Your Information with Twitter Business Partners” which allows you to disable sharing of this information. That setting still exists, but Twitter now says it has removed your control over “ ad measurement for mobile apps. ” If you disable the setting, sharing of other information, such as your interests, can still be prevented. Other privacy settings for Twitter, such as disabling web tracking, are still available. Twitter does not share your name, email address, phone number or username.

There are a few exceptions: This mobile ad data is still kept private for Twitter users in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and the United Kingdom. They will have to choose in to share the information if they want Twitter to share more information about them.

Twitter alerted users to the change with a pop-up when they opened the app at around 11 a.m.ET today. A Twitter spokesperson said the update is “part of our ongoing work on transparency and control. We want to ensure that people understand the settings we provide, what they do and how they can use them. Even users who didn’t turn off data sharing received the warning.

The availability of ad data has had a major impact on Twitter’s revenues in the past. Twitter last year accused one earner a bug that prevented this type of ad data from being used and shared properly. At the same time, Twitter mentioned that a company had also been bug-led by some user settings to be ignored to prevent certain data from being shared. While Twitter isn’t completely removing those settings, today’s change seems to simplify things by giving Twitter more control in the first place.