Microblogging juggernaut and emerging mobile advertising titan Twitter is setting its sights on your email and browsing history.
Experimenting with “new ways to tailor ads,” Twitter will make ads more useful to users in the United States by displaying promoted content from brands and businesses that they’ve expressed interest in.
Twitter was careful to emphasize in Wednesday’s announcement that users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see “better ones.”
How does it work?
“Let’s say a local florist wants to advertise a Valentine’s Day special on Twitter,” explains, Kevin Weil, Twitter’s Senior Director of Product and Revenue. “They’d prefer to show their ad to flower enthusiasts who frequent their website or subscribe to their newsletter. To get the special offer to those people who are also on Twitter, the shop may share with us a scrambled, unreadable email address (a hash) or browser-related information (a browser cookie ID). We can then match that information to accounts in order to show them a Promoted Tweet with the Valentine’s Day deal. This is how most other companies handle this practice, and we don’t give advertisers any additional user information.”
If you’re thinking that you would prefer to not allow advertisers to target your browsing history and email address, you won’t be forced into the process.
“While we want to make our ads more useful, we also want to give users simple and meaningful privacy options,” Weil adds. “Simply uncheck the box next to “Promoted content” in your account settings, and Twitter will not match your account to information shared by our ad partners for tailoring ads. This is the only place you’ll need to disable this feature on Twitter.”
To read the full post on the Twitter blog, click here.