Twitter claims that it recently found issues with the way it adheres to user privacy settings and that it may have inadvertently shared user data with third parties.
The online news and social networking service said on its blog earlier this week that it may have shared users’ data without consent.
The company said, since May 2018 any user who clicked or viewed an ad on the app may have sent data about their experience with third-party measurement and advertising partners. The data would have included the user’s country code, information about the ad, and whether they engaged with the ad and when.
Another issue concerns assumptions Twitter made about the devices favored by its users, as it tried to deliver more-relevant targeted ads. Twitter said this data stayed within the company and did not include sensitive personal information such as email addresses or passwords.
Big tech companies have come under increased scrutiny in recent years regarding the ways in which users’ data is collected and processed.
Twitter has made efforts to be more transparent about how it collects, uses and shares peoples’ data. Just before the EU’s GDPR came into effect in May, 2018 the company published its new privacy notice.
Announcing that it had resolved the issue on Monday, a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement:
We take these issues seriously and whenever an issue arises, we conduct a review to ensure that we make changes to prevent these types of issues recurring, … In this case, we have deployed a fix which has corrected the data sharing authorization signals that caused this issue.
Sources: Newpaper24
