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This week, Twitter has announced its latest privacy policy, which makes some significant changes to what we've been used to so far. Given the several significant changes brought forward, we thought it important to give a general overview of just how much the two social media giants – Twitter and Facebook – know about you.

An important change to Twitter is that now in your settings you have a Personalization and Data section, which tells you exactly how your data is being shared and what kind of personalized experience you are getting. In this section, there is also the data tracking. Twitter will now collect people’s information on pages that show twitter buttons or embedded tweets for 30 days, rather than the current 10.

Twitter has also changed its stance on “Do Not Track” since the time it joined the movement five years ago. Many other platforms have abandoned the principle and Twitter doesn’t see a reason to support it anymore.

“Twitter has discontinued support of the Do Not Track browser preference," states the Twitter support page on Do Not Track. "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." 

To balance things, you have control of what twitter recognizes as your interests based on your web history. Another update in the settings is that it now reveals your interests and you can manually turn all of these off if you want to.

The changes to Twitter will become effective on June 18. After that time, if you are still using its services, you have automatically agreed with the terms. Twitter doesn’t store the web data of people from Europe and the EFTA States.

Facebook operates a similar policy, although it seems to be more accurate. While Twitter guesses our interests based on retweets, hashtags, and web interests, Facebook interests are the ones provided by the users themselves. All of these can be managed by the users on the Facebook advert preference page.

Facebook gives the option to hide specific topics from being advertised to you. So if there’s something particularly irksome, you can always make sure it doesn’t show up.

Facebook doesn’t follow the Do Not Track either. And neither do services like Google and Hulu, among others. They have all stated that the poor reception of it throughout the industry is the reason behind their decision, although the World Wide Web consortium will make the Do Not Track an official recommendation in August.
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Source: IFLScience