Twitter Will Track Your Browsing To Sell Ads

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 10, 2013 @01:45AM 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."

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Re: Nice.... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-10 03:10 · Score: 5, Funny

I think the point is he doesn't want a cookie...
Re:How does one prevent this ? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-10 03:14 · 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.