Twitter Will Track Your Browsing To Sell Ads

jfruh writes "Remember how social networks were going to transform the advertising industry because they'd tailor ads not to context or to your web browsing history, but to the innate preferences you express through interactions and relationships with friends? Well, that didn't work with Facebook, and it turns out it's not working with Twitter either. The microblogging site has announced that it's getting into the ad retargeting game: you'll soon start seeing promoted tweets that are chosen based on websites you've visited in the past. The innovation, if you can call it that, is that the retargeting will work across devices, so you can be looking at a website on your phone and see promoted tweets on your laptop's browser, or vice versa."

Comments

Impending backfire of doom

[Huntr]

I mean, what happens when 95% of promoted tweets are about porn?

Re:I'm glad they're adamantly opposed to surveilla

[Desler]

They aren't opposed to government surveillance. They are opposed to the damage done to their images because their collusion with the government was publicly revealed. Had Snowden never leaked anything you would have heard jack-and-shit from these companies about "reform". They would have just continued writing it off as a cost of doing business.

I'm sure I'll get downmodded again like I was yesterday for pointing this out by the clueless numbnuts who fall for these corporate PR stunts.