You better start watching what apps you have downloaded on your Smartphone. If you do have some apps that you don’t want anyone to know about, or see, you should take them off or stop using Twitter altogether. This is because, according to Tech Times who posted the report on Nov. 29, Twitter will be watching what apps you have on your phone as well as will see what you will download in the future, unless you opt out of course.
The announcement was made on their support page. This is what they said:
To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in.
According to the Huffington Post, Twitter has also stressed that they will only be using this new feature, called app graph, to keep a list of what apps you have on your phone and not what you do with those apps. They also say this new feature can help them suggest more people for you to follow based on the same app downloads meaning the new people they suggest might have similar interests as you.
However, you can opt out of this if you don’t want them monitoring what apps you download. First, they say users who have either limited ads on their iPhone’s or Android users who have already opted out of interest based ads will not be affected by this new feature. You can either turn these options on to not show ads meaning you won’t be affected at all or you can read their step-by-step tutorial on how to opt out another way.
If you do have interest ads on your phone and don’t turn the ‘opt out’ option off, you will get a message that says, ‘to help tailor your experience, Twitter uses apps on your device.’ Once this message comes up, the feature has been activated.
What do you think about this? Do you think this is just another invasion of privacy? Share your thoughts on this new feature by Twitter by posting in the comments section below
