Use Twitter on your smartphone? If so, you’ll definitely want to pay attention to this new “feature” that Twitter is adding to its Android and iOS apps.
It’s been revealed that Twitter plans to begin tracking the applications that users have downloaded to their smartphones. Twitter explains that its “app graph” will gather the names of apps that you have installed on your device so that it can offer better “who to follow” suggestions, add content to your timeline that it thinks you’ll be interested in and show you relevant promoted content. Twitter says that it will not collect any data from within the apps themselves.
This new feature will begin rolling out to the Twitter app for iOS today, November 26, and will hit Android users over the next week. Thankfully, you can opt out by turning the setting off in your Twitter app’s Settings menu.
Even though Twitter promises that it won’t collect data from your other apps, I’m betting that many Twitter users won’t like the company collecting information on the other apps that they have installed on their phones and tablets. And the fact that it’s opt-out means that many folks likely will never know that the feature exists and that it’s collecting data on their app downloads.
