Twitter will share more of your data with Facebook and Google to advertise its app on those platforms

In context: Twitter has been trying to make money for years, and while it did become profitable in 2018, the way it achieved that performance was to use some user data without permission. Now it’s changing its privacy policy to avoid such mishaps in the future.

Twitter is making a small but significant change in how it monetizes its platform, which involves sharing more of your data with its business partners. In doing so, the company is revealing how it uses that information to advertise on platforms like Facebook and Google.

The updated privacy policy comes with the removal of a setting that allowed users of the mobile app to control how much personal information they allow Twitter to use in advertising measurements. That means the company will now monitor how every user interacts with ads to get a better idea of their effectiveness.

Other privacy settings like sharing your interests or web and location tracking to help personalize ads are still available and can be disabled.

Twitter says that while it may use IP addresses and advertising device IDs, it won’t share names, usernames, email addresses, and phone numbers. For those of you who live in the EU and the UK, the company has to comply with GDPR so it won’t collect that data unless you opt in for that in the privacy settings.

The social giant says these changes will allow it to “continue operating as a free service,” and are “part of our ongoing work around transparency and control. We want to ensure that people understand the settings we provide, what they do and how to use them.” Of course, this is also a requirement introduced by both Google and Facebook that controls how advertisers import data into their platforms.

Back in August 2019, it emerged that Twitter shared data it didn’t have permission to with advertisers and made assumptions about the devices you use to serve you specific ads. The company later blamed that for missing third and fourth quarter revenue targets, and told investors the issues would continue well into 2020.

Last month, the microblogging platform withdrew its first quarter guidance due to Covid-19 further hammering its advertising business despite seeing an 8 percent increase in daily active users from the 152 million recorded in Q4 2019. Facebook and Google are also expected to see an estimated $44 billion loss in advertising revenue by the end of this year.