Twitter is tracking your web activities, learn how to stop it

Twitter recently, and quietly, launched a new feature that provides suggestions on people you should follow.

Sounds great, right?

The catch is: to do this they track websites you visit that use the Twitter tools (buttons and widgets).  The problem I have is they’re assuming all twitter users want their  web activities tracked, stored, and used by a Twitter as they want. By default, your enrollment for this feature is turned on (see image to the below).

With Twitter’s personalization and  Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” (see my previous article), social networking sites are overstepping the privacy rights of their users. No one should assume I want  giant information gathers (like FB and Twitter) to be capturing my activities – unless I give them specific authority to gather and store this information.  While it may be good for building a better social experience for you, it would be bad if they use the information inappropriately, or hacked (that will never happen) and the data is stolen.

To turn off this feature,  edit your Twitter profile, click on the “account” tab.  Down this page you will find the personalization check-box. Un-check it and save your changes.

They provide a link to “Learn more“.  I suggest you read up on it and decide for yourself.