Twitter collects personal data to use for targeted advertising, and that data can be shared with other companies. If you’d rather not give so much personal information to Twitter and advertisers, you can turn off those settings. Read on to learn how.
By default, Twitter uses personal information about you and based on your activities to better target advertising. That includes showing personalized ads, keeping track of every device you use to read and post tweets, tracking web browser activity, and sharing information with advertisers.
Here’s how to disable Twitter’s personal data collection and sharing for advertisers:
- Go to Twitter’s Personalization and Data settings web page
- Click Disable all to stop all data collection for advertising
- Click Save changes
- Click Yes, I’m sure
Alternately, you can pick and choose what Twitter does with your personal information and online activity. Just uncheck the boxes for the the things you don’t want Twitter to do.
It seems that every time I check Twitter/Facebook/etc. they have added some new and annoying “privacy” setting which is always set the opposite of how I want it to be.
Unfortunately, as Mark Zuckerberg has pointed out, you can’t really quit Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon/etc. as they keep a profile on you regardless of whether you have an account. Those social media badges on every page on the web? They phone home to the mother ship to let them know the pages you visit. Same with web “analytics” like Google Analytics. Did you ever make the mistake of clicking an ad and buying something? Everything’s linked to your phone number, shipping address, billing address, etc. for eternity. Think that Safari cross-site tracking protection actually protects you? It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t stop them and it also turns off automatically for any sites that you actually visit like Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon/etc..
I’m really not sure how this situation is going to improve, but at the very least I recommend blocking social media trackers via the extension of your choice.
Cheers Mr. Jeff