Twitter now apologizes for using user data for advertising purposes

Twitter

Now this week, Twitter has admitted that it has been misusing user's personal data for advertisement targeting purposes.


The social app user's phone numbers and email addresses used for advertising purposes, even though the information was provided by users for two-factor authentication. The data had been used to match with more relevant ads.


It might be hard to believe, but people often share information with social media companies that they want to keep private.


The company claimed it mistakenly used ostensibly private data to assist with its ad system, specifically its Tailored Audiences and Partnered Audiences tools.


The company explained,

"Tailored Audiences is a version of an industry-standard product that allows advertisers to target ads to customers based on the advertiser's own marketing lists (e.g., email addresses or phone numbers they have compiled). Partner Audiences allows advertisers to use the same Tailored Audiences features to target ads to audiences provided by third-party partners. When an advertiser uploaded their marketing list, we may have matched people on Twitter to their list based on the email or phone number the Twitter account holder provided for safety and security purposes. This was an error and we apologize."

Twitter used that data as a matching tool to better correlate audiences for ads. The social media platform said that starting September 17, the issue that caused this and is "no longer using phone numbers or email addresses collected for safety or security purposes for advertising."


Twitter said,

“We’re very sorry this happened and are taking steps to make sure we don’t make a mistake like this again.”

The company also added at the time that no information was breached or misused.


At this point, for sure, it's clear that whether the reason for using the user's data, social media companies simply can't be trusted now, because they always promise to keep it private. So, apologizes doesn't change that.





Source