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Twitter Will Track Your Browsing To Sell Ads

Posted by timothy on from the awareness-is-key dept.

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."

5 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. How does one prevent this ? by middlemen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a genuine question. Assuming one uses Twitter from the phone, how does one prevent the Twitter app on the phone to scan the browsing history ? If they cannot scan my browsing history they cannot give me ads.

    On another note, if there are companies who can scan tweets (such as stocktwits) to give you sentiment analysis, why cant Twitter do the same ? Have they realized that they just have a bunch of web developers who know only Javascript and can't do text processing using it ?

    1. Re:How does one prevent this ? by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And this is true even if you don't have a twitter account or use Twitter. It is just in that case they don't know anything about you.

      And this is why ad blockers, cookie blockers, and script blockers are your friends.

      Deny them the data is the best approach.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:How does one prevent this ? by mlts · · Score: 4, Informative

      I use sandboxie, and find it well worth using. With additional "supercookies" and methods to save state, having all Web browser data saved on a different volume, and is completely purged when done, no matter how many hidden files are written, is a good method of protecting privacy. Doesn't take much doing either. One can force a browser to run in a sandbox, or just right-click on it, select "run in sandbox", pick the sandbox you want it in, and go.

      This is also coupled with "click to play" for Flash or other stuff, and using AdBlock for an extension, so the browser doesn't have to deal with most of the nasty stuff.

      I also run a different browser for banking that I do general browsing. The more separation, the better.

      People firewall their computers, might as well have a layer of security (sandbox or VM) against untrusted code that hits their machines directly.

    3. Re:How does one prevent this ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      This isn't even a permission an App can request on Android. Not sure about iOS.

      There is, actually. READ_HISTORY_BOOKMARKS

        To prevent apps from using this (and other permissions) download something like App Ops or root your device and use XPrivacy.

  2. Re: Nice.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think the point is he doesn't want a cookie...