How To Stop Twitter From Tracking You On The Web

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Twitter in a blog post has announced that they’re “experimenting with new ways to tailor ads.” The company says that with the new experiment, it aims to make ads on Twitter more useful to users in the United States.

Well, it’s their way to saying that they’re starting to track you around the web and worst of all – even when you leave Twitter. This information is then transmitted to advertisers so that they can better target their ads.

How To Stop Twitter From Tracking You On The Web

Twitter already uses follow button and other social widgets on websites to see where its logged in users go after leaving Twitter, but now that the company is explicitly mentioning the same thing in a blog post, and informing users about it, then it surely is a good thing. Being transparent to users is something that not every company aims to do (remember how Facebook handles users privacy).

Tracking System On Twitter

Now, let’s take a look at how to turn off Twitter’s new tracking system:

Login to Twitter and visit your account settings page by clicking on the small gear icon and selecting “Settings.”

Uncheck two boxes, namely:

1. “Tailor Twitter based on my recent website visits”

2. “Tailor ads based on information shared by ad partners”

tweet-protect

Twitter says that “this is the only place you’ll need to disable this feature.” If you have Do Not Track enabled in your web browser then you’ll be able to see a tick mark as you can see in the above screenshot.

With this change, Twitter claims that users will not see more ads, but they’ll see better ones – ads that are targeted to the right users. Well, whatever it is, it’s a good idea to stay out of it. So go ahead and opt-out of web activity tracking by Twitter using the above method. It will just take a minute or two but it’s worth it.

You might also like to learn how to enable private browsing on Firefox and Dolphin for Android.

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