Twitter is planning to track all of the other apps on your smartphone, in a move to allow more personalised marketing.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Twitter was a sparkly happy place, away from the over-marketed, invasive nonsense that Facebook unashamedly throws at you each time you log in. Sadly it appears that this will no longer be the case, with the Twitter phone app set to spy on your mobile activities.
The micro-blogging site will now track your apps through a program called ‘AppGraph’ in order to profile you, and it won’t even ask your permission to do so.
Twitter will show a prompt after the update, letting users know about the new feature and it is possible to opt-out, but you’ll have to go into your settings and manually adjust them yourself if you want to be exempted from the company’s phishing expedition.
In the grand scheme of things the feature isn’t quite as invasive as Facebook, which actually logs your browser history to push personalised adverts to your timeline, but it’s disappointing that yet another social media site is going down this road.
It would be naïve of us to think that an app which appears to be free wouldn’t try to monetise our details in some way, but we always saw Twitter as the slightly more squeaky-clean of the social media sites in this respect.
It’s worth remembering that just about any app you use has the potential to skim your personal data in this way and that it’s always wise to double check what permissions you’ve given your apps before you start using them.
How to stop Twitter from spying on your app activities, by disabling AppGraph
To disable ‘AppGraph’ on both Android and iOS, go into your devices settings, choose which account you wish to adjust, choose ‘other’ on Android or ‘privacy’ on iOS and change the ‘Tailor Twitter based on my Apps’ option.
Leave a Reply