What Twitter’s privacy changes mean for you
new york — Twitter’s new privacy policy suggests ambitions of becoming more like Facebook — more tracking of users and more targeting of ads to rake in more money.
Twitter recently reported its first quarterly revenue decline since going public. That should give you some clues about the reasons behind the policy changes, which take effect on June 18. Twitter was already tracking users. For example, if you visited a webpage that had an embedded tweet or a button to share something on Twitter, you could be tracked and targeted.
With the changes, Twitter expands the pool of people it can track and lets the company collect more data about those people when they are visiting sites around the web, said Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry-backed thinktank in Washington.
In addition, Twitter will no longer honour the ‘Do Not Track’ option that let people say no to being tracked by the likes of ad and social networks. Many such networks no longer honour that option anyway. Polonetsky said Twitter had been “one of the rare prominent brands that respected Do Not Track”. The short answer is money. A longer answer? Targeted ads that are tailored to your whims and tastes are more lucrative than generic ones. That’s the selling point of online advertising, and the reason why companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter offer their services for free. The implied understanding is that they will make money off you by showing you ads.
Research firm eMarketer expects worldwide digital ad spending to hit $224 billion this year. Google and Facebook will command a combined $110 billion of this. Twitter, though, is estimated to get just $2.3 billion, or about one per cent. Twitter’s investors are hungry for a larger slice of the pie. That depends on whom you ask. Twitter, of course, is giving the impression that it’s a good thing, or at least not something many users will care about. In a pop-up notification telling users of the change, Twitter chirps that you will “soon start to see more relevant Tweets and ads based on your visits to sites with Twitter content.” It says that the tailored ads you already see will improve and that “we’ve given you even more control” over your data.
“Twitter’s announcement is bad news for online privacy. The company dropped Do Not Track and gave advertisers access to more user data,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. —