Twitter May Have Shared Your Data Without Permission

Social media users are facing a variety of threats regarding the privacy of information. Earlier in 2018, Facebook was put on the “hot seat” for selling personal data of millions of people without their consent to a third-party company to serve political advertising purposes. After the scandal, users across the world immediately turned their attention to other social platforms including Twitter for privacy assurance. However, on Aug 7, Twitter itself disclosed that the microblogging website may have shared data with its advertising partners without users’ permission.

Twitter said on its blog post that the setting choices of users might not work correctly as intended. In details, people interacting with the mobile application from May 2018 face the risk of personal data exposure as the company has shared certain data with its partners. The data includes country code, information about the ads, users’ behaviors on interacting with the ads, etc.

Twitter explained that the activities are part of their campaign to promote relevant advertising on the platform. During the process, they might present different ads to users based on inferences about the devices people are using. However, the data doesn’t contain passwords or email accounts.

How the company fixed the issues

The number of affected users has been unknown, but the company has finished fixing the issues on Aug 5. The company remains under an investigation to figure out the whole consequence, as well as to determine the identity of the victims.

Last year, the platform excluded more than 143,000 malicious apps to enhance their assurance for user privacy. Despite not being criticized strongly as Facebook, Twitter has been under scrutiny for failing to prevent misinformation spreading across the platform prior to the 2016 U.S Presidential Elections.