You may have heard that Twitter is changing their Privacy Policy to stop respecting Do Not Track, and some other stuff. I looked into this and found that it is incredibly slimy and reeks of desperation.

They sent an email announcing this and claiming that it was protecting your privacy. This is obvious lies, but basically SOP so whatever. But it gets worse. There are two main pages linked:

Transparency and control: We’ve launched new Personalization and Data settings and expanded Your Twitter Data to give you more transparent access to your information and more granular controls over how your data is used by Twitter. These enhanced settings will replace Twitter’s reliance on the Do Not Track browser setting, which we will no longer support.

And then when you look at the heading Data Sharing, you see this:

Data sharing: We’ve updated how we share non-personal, aggregated, and device-level data, including under select partnership agreements that allow the data to be linked to your name, email, or other personal information if you give the partner your consent. You can control whether your data is shared under these partnership agreements in your Personalization and Data settings.

So if you read this, you’ll probably think that if you’re concerned about your Twitter data being shared with advertisers, you should go to the page linked there. (https://twitter.com/personalization). So, like a sensible, privacy-conscious human bean, you go to the page:

Handy, a Disable all button. Cool, I’ll press that and then move on to the rest of the settings to check. Unsurprisingly, it makes you click again to confirm. *leaves page*

Oh Wait. I want to check the wording on one of those. Wait, what? It didn’t change!

Oh, this is what’s up:

There is a second button you need to press to actually make changes. It doesn’t warn you if you try to leave without saving, and the extra confirmation that would normally be associated with this is moved to the Disable All button instead. Slime.

Also, take a look at this:

Share data through select partnerships

This setting lets Twitter share certain private data (which will never include your name, email, or phone number) through select partnerships. Partners have agreed not to link your name, email, or phone number to data shared through these partnerships without first getting your consent.

That sounds good, but compare with some text on the next page we’re visiting:

Tailored audiences

Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business.

You are currently part of 390 audiences from 156 advertisers.

You can opt out of interest-based advertising in your personalization and data settings. This will change the ads you see on Twitter, however it won’t remove you from advertisers’ audiences.

So, you can depersonalize your ads on Twitter, and ostensibly stop them from sharing your data, but they’ll still be sharing it with the advertiser lists they’ve already placed you on. Shiny.

This is that page, by the way:

Other than the paragraph mentioned above, this doesn’t look deceptive.  In contrast to the totally deceptive first page linked, this one is annoying and awkward to mess around with, which is slimy, but the main concern I have is just how much data they’re collecting, which I am significantly less OK with than previously when I thought they might not be slime.

In conclusion, don’t trust Twitter further than you can throw one of their mainframes. Ceterum censeo Twittrem esse delendam.