Twitter will soon start monitoring on the apps you download.
The latest Twitter app update will add a setting that allows the social network to keep track of the apps you download, as the company announced on Wednesday.
According to Twitter, the goal of this update is to provide users with a “more tailored experience.” By tracking the apps people are downloading, the social media company can gauge users’ interests and display better suggestions of new accounts to follow and, obviously, more relevant ads.
The feature, which called “app graph” by the company will also be used to personalise the content that appears in users’ timeline from accounts they don’t follow. Twitter has confirmed in August that users would begin seeing tweets and favorites from accounts they don’t follow in their timeline. It wasn’t clear at the time exactly how Twitter planned to make those changes but the company says app graph will help inform those additions.
Once the update goes live, users are automatically guided to the tracking, though Twitter will notify users within the app once it starts and you can choose to ignore it. Twitter notes that the option is only tracking a list of the apps users have downloaded and is not accessing any data within those apps.
However, if you are not too fond of this “monitoring system”, you can opt out of the tracking through the the main Twitter app’s settings menu. On iOS this is through setting -> account -> privacy -> “Tailor Twitter based on my apps.” Similarly, Android users can disable the setting through settings -> account -> other -> “Tailor Twitter based on my apps.”
Twitter is not the first social network to use your activity outside of its app to inform what kinds of ads you see. Facebook relies on users’ browsing history to show relevant ads. Moreover, both iOS and Android allow developers to access information about what kinds of apps their users are downloading, though not all developers choose to take advantage of these tools.