In a blog post on July 3rd, Twitter mentioned that they will soon be "experimenting with a way to make ads on Twitter more useful to our users in the United States by displaying promoted content from brands and businesses they’ve shown interest in. Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones."
While this may sound innocuous, it really means that they will be collaborating with some businesses to get some info about you, as they state here: " How does this work? Let’s say a local florist wants to advertise a Valentine’s Day special on Twitter. They’d prefer to show their ad to flower enthusiasts who frequent their website or subscribe to their newsletter. To get the special offer to those people who are also on Twitter, the shop may share with us a scrambled, unreadable email address (a hash) or browser-related information (a browser cookie ID). We can then match that information to accounts in order to show them a Promoted Tweet with the Valentine’s Day deal."
If you feel that you are being tracked enough already, here’s how to turn off Twitter’s new tracking (see a a screenshot below the instructions):
- Log in to Twitter and visit your account settings page. It’s on the top right under the gear.
- Uncheck the box next to "Personalization" that says "Tailor Twitter based on my recent website visits."
- Uncheck the box next to "Promoted Content" that says "Tailor ads based on information shared by ad partners."
- Scroll down and click "Save Changes."
