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Comment by Kronopath | Hacker News Reader

Why does this need access to my Twitter account to run? Can't it just get the publicly-facing information from the Twitter API?

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All Twitter API methods require authentication now-a-days. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

Why don't they authenticate with their own Twitter account? I'm not sure why they would need mine.

The Twitter API calls are rate limited and it would be impossible to handle any meaningful traffic.

Feels like click bait to me. They could use their own authentication token to use the Twitter API. Not mine.

Click bait in what sense? They are only requesting access to read (not post) tweets.

And the reason is because that's how Twitter sort of forces you to do it with their API rate limiting.

This might simply be an easy way for the company providing the app to get a lot of twitter users access tokens, to be used in their commercial product in order to get around the twitter API rate limits... LeadSift requires a read-only access so it should not affect you too much.

At the very least they should seriously limit to privileges they are requesting. Why do you need to be able to post as me, view my password(?!?!?) and update my profile?

You are listing the items in the "This application WILL NOT BE ABLE TO" section. Obviously, no application gets to view your Twitter password...

The actual app requests read access to your timeline and followers list.

Ah my bad. Thanks for correcting me :)

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