Twitter Privacy Policy

You don’t have to create an account to use some of our service features, such as searching and viewing public Twitter profiles or watching a broadcast on Periscope’s website. If you do choose to create an account, you must provide us with some personal data so that we can provide our services to you. On Twitter this includes a display name (for example, “Twitter Moments”), a username (for example, @TwitterMoments), a password, and an email address or phone number. Your display name and username are always public, but you can use either your real name or a pseudonym. You can also create and manage multiple Twitter accounts¹, for example to express different parts of your identity.

Most activity on Twitter is public, including your profile information², your time zone and language, when you created your account, and your Tweets and certain information about your Tweets like the date, time, and application and version of Twitter you Tweeted from. You also may choose to publish your location in your Tweets or your Twitter profile. The lists you create, people you follow and who follow you, and Tweets you Like or Retweet are also public. If you like, Retweet, reply, or otherwise publicly engage with an ad on our services, that advertiser might thereby learn information about you associated with the ad with which you engaged such as characteristics of the audience the ad was intended to reach. Periscope broadcasts you create, click on, or otherwise engage with, either on Periscope or on Twitter, are public along with when you took those actions. So are your hearts, comments, the number of hearts you’ve received, which accounts you are a Superfan of, and whether you watched a broadcast live or on replay. Any hearts, comments, or other content you contribute to another account’s broadcast will remain part of that broadcast for as long as it remains on Periscope. Information posted about you by other people who use our services may also be public. For example, other people may tag you in a photo³ (if your settings allow) or mention you in a Tweet.

You are responsible for your Tweets and other information you provide through our services, and you should think carefully about what you make public, especially if it is sensitive information. If you update your public information on Twitter, such as by deleting a Tweet or deactivating your account, we will reflect your updated content on Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS, and Twitter for Android.

By publicly posting content when you Tweet, you are directing us to disclose that information as broadly as possible, including through our APIs, and directing those accessing the information through our APIs to do the same. To facilitate the fast global dissemination of Tweets to people around the world, we use technology like application programming interfaces (APIs) and embeds to make that information available to websites, apps, and others for their use - for example, displaying Tweets on a news website or analyzing what people say on Twitter. We generally make this content available in limited quantities for free and charge licensing fees for large-scale access. We have standard terms that govern how this data can be used, and a compliance program to enforce these terms. But these individuals and companies are not affiliated with Twitter, and their offerings may not reflect updates you make on Twitter. For more information about how we make public data on Twitter available to the world, visit https://developer.twitter.com.

We use your contact information, such as your email address or phone number, to authenticate your account and keep it - and our services - secure, and to help prevent spam, fraud, and abuse. We also use contact information to enable certain account features (for example, for login verification or Twitter via SMS), and to send you information about our services, and to personalize our services, including ads. If you provide us with your phone number, you agree to receive text messages from Twitter to that number as your country’s laws allow. Twitter also uses your contact information to market to you as your country’s laws allow, and to help others find your account if your settings permit, including through third-party services and client applications. You can use your settings for email and mobile notifications to control notifications you receive from Twitter. You can also unsubscribe from a notification by following the instructions contained within the notification or here.

You can choose to upload and sync your address book on Twitter so that we can help you find and connect with people you know and help others find and connect with you. We also use this information to better recommend content to you and others.

You can sign up for Periscope with an account from another service like Twitter, Google, or Facebook, or connect your Periscope account to these other services. If you do, we will use information from that service, including your email address, friends, or contacts list, to recommend other accounts or content to you or to recommend your account or content to others. You can control whether your Periscope account is discoverable by email through your Periscope settings.

If you email us, we will keep the content of your message, your email address, and your contact information to respond to your request.

We provide certain features that let you communicate more privately or control who sees your content. For example, you can use Direct Messages to have non-public conversations on Twitter, protect your Tweets, or host private broadcasts on Periscope. When you communicate with others by sending or receiving Direct Messages, we will store and process your communications and information related to them. This includes link scanning for malicious content, link shortening to http://t.co URLs, detection of spam⁴, abuse and prohibited images, and use of reported issues. We also use information about whom you have communicated with and when (but not the content of those communications) to better understand the use of our services, to protect the safety and integrity of our platform, and to show more relevant content. We share the content of your Direct Messages with the people you’ve sent them to; we do not use them to serve you ads. Note that if you interact in a way that would ordinarily be public with Twitter content shared with you via Direct Message, for instance by liking a Tweet, those interactions will be public. When you use features like Direct Messages to communicate, remember that recipients have their own copy⁵ of your communications on Twitter - even if you delete your copy of those messages from your account - which they may duplicate, store, or re-share.

You may provide us with payment information⁶, including your credit or debit card number, card expiration date, CVV code, and billing address, in order to purchase advertising or other offerings provided as part of our services.

Your Privacy and safety settings let you decide:

• Whether your Tweets are publicly available on Twitter
  
• Whether others can tag you in a photo
  
• Whether you will be able to receive Direct Messages from anyone on Twitter or just your followers
  
• Whether others can find you based on your email or phone number
  
• Whether you upload your address book to Twitter for storage and use
  
• When and where you may see sensitive content on Twitter
  
• Whether you want to block or mute other Twitter accounts
  

We require information about your signup and current location, which we get from signals such as your IP address or device settings, to securely and reliably set up and maintain your account and to provide our services to you.

Subject to your settings, we may collect, use, and store additional information about your location - such as your current precise position or places where you’ve previously used Twitter - to operate or personalize our services including with more relevant content like local trends, stories, ads, and suggestions for people to follow. Learn more about Twitter’s use of location here, and how to set your Twitter location preferences here. Learn more about how to share your location in Periscope broadcasts here.

In order to operate our services, we keep track of how you interact with links across our services. This includes links in emails we send you and links in Tweets that appear on other websites or mobile applications.

If you click on an external link or ad on our services, that advertiser or website operator might figure out that you came from Twitter or Periscope, along with other information associated with the ad you clicked such as characteristics of the audience it was intended to reach. They may also collect other personal data from you, such as cookie identifiers or your IP address.

A cookie is a small piece of data that is stored on your computer or mobile device. Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and to operate our services. Cookies are not required for many parts of our services such as searching and looking at public profiles. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, many browsers’ settings can be set to decline cookies or alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer⁷. However, some of our services may not function properly if you disable cookies. When your browser or device allows it, we use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our services, to monitor aggregate usage patterns, and to personalize and otherwise operate our services such as by providing account security, personalizing the content we show you including ads, and remembering your language preferences. We do not support the Do Not Track browser option. You can learn more about how we use cookies and similar technologies here.

We receive information when you view content on or otherwise interact with our services, which we refer to as “Log Data,” even if you have not created an account. For example, when you visit our websites, sign into our services, interact with our email notifications, use your account to authenticate to a third-party service, or visit a third-party service that includes Twitter content, we may receive information about you. This Log Data includes information such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, location, your mobile carrier, device information (including device and application IDs), search terms (including those not submitted as queries), and cookie information. We also receive Log Data when you click on, view, or interact with links on our services, including when you install another application through Twitter. We use Log Data to operate our services and ensure their secure, reliable, and robust performance. For example, we use Log Data to protect the security of accounts and to determine what content is popular on our services. We also use this data to improve the content we show you, including ads and to improve the effectiveness of our own marketing.

We use information you provide to us and data we receive, including Log Data and data from third parties, to make inferences like what topics you may be interested in, how old you are, and what languages you speak. This helps us better promote and design our services for you and personalize the content we show you, including ads.

When you view our content on third-party websites that integrate Twitter content such as embedded timelines or Tweet buttons, we may receive Log Data that includes the web page you visited. We use this information to better understand the use of our services, to protect the safety and integrity of our platform, and to show more relevant content, including ads. We do not associate this web browsing history with your name, email address, phone number, or username, and we delete, obfuscate, or aggregate it after no longer than 30 days. We do not collect this data from browsers that we believe to be located in the European Union or EFTA States.

Advertising revenue allows us to support and improve our services. We use the information described in this Privacy Policy to help make our advertising more relevant to you, to measure its effectiveness, and to help recognize your devices to serve you ads on and off of Twitter. Our ad partners and affiliates share information with us such as browser cookie IDs, mobile device IDs, hashed email addresses, demographic or interest data, and content viewed or actions taken on a website or app. Some of our ad partners, particularly our advertisers, also enable us to collect similar information directly from their website or app by integrating our advertising technology. Information shared by ad partners and affiliates or collected by Twitter from the websites and apps of ad partners and affiliates may be combined with the other information you share with Twitter and that Twitter receives about you described elsewhere in our Privacy Policy.

Twitter adheres to the Digital Advertising Alliance Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising (also referred to as “interest-based advertising”) and respects the DAA’s consumer choice tool for you to opt out of interest-based advertising at https://optout.aboutads.info. In addition, our ads policies prohibit advertisers from targeting ads based on categories that we consider sensitive or are prohibited by law, such as race, religion, politics, sex life, or health. Learn more about your privacy options for interest-based ads here and about how ads work on our services here.

If you are an advertiser or a prospective advertiser, we process your personal data to help offer and provide our advertising services. You can update your data in your Twitter Ads dashboard or by contacting us directly as described in this Privacy Policy.

If you access our APIs or developer portal, we process your personal data to help provide our services. You can update your data by contacting us directly as described in this Privacy Policy.

We may receive information about you from third parties who are not our ad partners, such as others on Twitter, partners who help us evaluate the safety and quality of content on our platform, our corporate affiliates, and other services you link to your Twitter account.

You may choose to connect your Twitter account to accounts on another service, and that other service may send us information about your account on that service. We use the information we receive to provide you features like cross-posting or cross-service authentication, and to operate our services. For integrations that Twitter formally supports, you may revoke this permission at any time from your application settings; for other integrations, please visit the other service you have connected to Twitter.

When you log into Twitter on a browser or device, we will associate that browser or device with your account for purposes such as authentication, security, and personalization. Subject to your settings, we may also associate your account with browsers or devices other than those you use to log into Twitter (or associate your logged-out device or browser with other browsers or devices). When you provide other information to Twitter, including an email address, we associate that information with your Twitter account. Subject to your settings, we may also use this information in order to infer other information about your identity, for example by associating your account with hashes of email addresses that share common components with the email address you have provided to Twitter. We do this to operate and personalize our services. For example, if you visit websites with sports content on your laptop, we may show you sports-related ads on Twitter for Android and, if the email address associated with your account shares components with another email address, such as shared first name, last name, or initials, we may later match advertisements to you from advertisers that were trying to reach email addresses containing those components.

Your Twitter Personalization and data settings let you decide:

• Whether we show you interest-based ads on and off Twitter
  
• How we personalize based on your inferred identity
  
• Whether we collect and use your precise location
  
• Whether we personalize your experience based on where you’ve been
  
• Whether we keep track of the websites where you see Twitter content
  

You can use Your Twitter data to review:

• Advertisers who have included you in tailored audiences to serve you ads
  
• Demographic and interest data about your account from our ads partners
  
• Information that Twitter has inferred about you such as your age range, gender, languages, and interests
  

We also provide a version of these tools on Twitter if you don’t have a Twitter account, or if you’re logged out of your account. This lets you see the data and settings for the logged out browser or device you are using, separate from any Twitter account that uses that browser or device. On Periscope, you can control whether we personalize your experience based on your watch history through your settings.

Please see here for more details of how we collect and use your data.

We share or disclose your personal data with your consent or at your direction, such as when you authorize a third-party web client or application to access your account or when you direct us to share your feedback with a business. If you’ve shared information like Direct Messages or protected Tweets with someone else who accesses Twitter through a third-party service, keep in mind that the information may be shared with the third-party service.

Subject to your settings, we also provide certain third parties with personal data to help us offer or operate our services. For example, we share with advertisers the identifiers of devices that saw their ads, to enable them to measure the effectiveness of our advertising business. You can learn more about these partnerships in our Help Center, and you can control whether Twitter shares your personal data in this way by using the “Share your data with Twitter’s business partners” option in your Personalization and Data settings. (This setting does not control sharing described elsewhere in our Privacy Policy, such as when we share data with our service providers.) The information we share with these partners does not include your name, email address, phone number, or Twitter username, but some of these partnerships allow the information we share to be linked to other personal information if the partner gets your consent first.

We engage service providers to perform functions and provide services to us in the United States, Ireland, and other countries. For example, we use a variety of third-party services to help operate our services, such as hosting our various blogs and wikis, and to help us understand the use of our services, such as Google Analytics. We may share your private personal data with such service providers subject to obligations consistent with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures, and on the condition that the third parties use your private personal data only on our behalf and pursuant to our instructions (service providers may use other non-personal data for their own benefit). We share your payment information with payment services providers to process payments; prevent, detect, and investigate fraud or other prohibited activities; facilitate dispute resolution such as chargebacks or refunds; and for other purposes associated with the acceptance of credit and debit cards.

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Privacy Policy or controls we may otherwise offer to you, we may preserve, use, or disclose your personal data or other safety data if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to protect the safety of any person; to protect the safety or integrity of our platform, including to help prevent spam, abuse, or malicious actors on our services, or to explain why we have removed content or accounts from our services⁸; to address fraud, security, or technical issues; or to protect our rights or property or the rights or property of those who use our services. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party’s, including a government’s, request to disclose your personal data.

In the event that we are involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, your personal data may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. This Privacy Policy will apply to your personal data as transferred to the new entity. We may also disclose personal data about you to our corporate affiliates in order to help operate our services and our affiliates’ services, including the delivery of ads.

We share or disclose non-personal data, such as aggregated information like the total number of times people engaged with a Tweet, demographics, the number of people who clicked on a particular link or voted on a poll in a Tweet (even if only one did), the topics that people are Tweeting about in a particular location, some inferred interests, or reports to advertisers about how many people saw or clicked on their ads.

If you have registered an account on Twitter, we provide you with tools and account settings to access, correct, delete, or modify the personal data you provided to us and associated with your account. You can download certain account information, including your Tweets, by following the instructions here. On Periscope, you can request correction, deletion, or modification of your personal data, and download your account information, by following the instructions here. You can learn more about the interests we have inferred about you in Your Twitter Data and request access to additional information here. To submit a request related to access, modification or deletion of your information, you may also contact us as specified in the How To Contact Us section of our Privacy Policy (Additional Information or Assistance).

We keep Log Data for a maximum of 18 months. If you follow the instructions here (or for Periscope here), your account will be deactivated. When deactivated, your Twitter account, including your display name, username, and public profile, will no longer be viewable on Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS, and Twitter for Android. For up to 30 days after deactivation it is still possible to restore your Twitter account if it was accidentally or wrongfully deactivated.

Keep in mind that search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your profile information and public Tweets, even after you have deleted the information from our services or deactivated your account. Learn more here.

When you are logged into your Twitter account, you can manage your privacy settings and other account features here at any time. It may take a short amount of time for privacy settings to be fully reflected throughout our systems.

Twitter provides you a means to download the information you have shared through our services by following the steps here. Periscope provides you a means to download the information you have shared through our services by following the steps here.

Thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy? Please let us know by contacting us here or writing to us at the appropriate address below.

If you live in the United States or any other country outside of the European Union or the European Economic Area, the data controller responsible for your personal data is Twitter, Inc. with an address of:

Twitter, Inc.
Attn: Privacy Policy Inquiry
1355 Market Street, Suite 900
San Francisco, CA 94103

If you live in the European Union or European Economic Area, the data controller is Twitter International Company, with an address of:

Twitter International Company
Attn: Data Protection Officer
One Cumberland Place, Fenian Street
Dublin 2, D02 AX07 IRELAND

You can confidentially contact Twitter’s Data Protection Officer here. If you wish to raise a concern about our use of your information (and without prejudice to any other rights you may have), you have the right to do so with your local supervisory authority or Twitter International Company’s lead supervisory authority, the Irish Data Protection Commission. You can find their contact details here.