Big Brother Twitter is watching you

If you have a Twitter account, maybe you also received the message below.

Twitter changed its privacy policy to bring you a ‘more personalized Twitter experience’. Of course this is nonsense. The idea behind twitter is exactly that you personalize your timeline by following people that publish content you’re interested in. The ‘personalized’ experience Twitter is talking about, is nothing more than the targeted advertisements they’re going to show on Twitter (and even on other websites) based on your surfing behavior. Ads that come at a price: your online privacy.

Not only the personalization settings but also the data settings have been changed and activated by default. It seems these settings were consciously hidden, hoping that most people won’t make the effort to change them.

However, via this url it’s very easy to change these settings. I strongly advice you to do so straight away.

This is a screenshot of the settings in Dutch. As you can see in the left part of the image, by default several personalization and data (=’gegevens’ in Dutch) settings are checked by default. If you no longer want Twitter to monitor your online behavior and share your data with partners, deselect all the boxes. (right part of the image)